On “Savage Thought”: Gabriele D’Annunzio, Guido Boggiani, and Italy’s Transatlantic Mediterranean Empire

Abstract

AbstractCritics have long debated the degree to which Gabriele D’Annunzio should be viewed as a fascist and an imperialist, a virtual daguerreotype for Mussolini. But D’Annunzio’s evolving investment in an Italian empire-state suggests that we should complicate our understanding of his links to fascism. This essay traces correspondences between “savage thought,” coming out of ethnographic anthropology from Latin America, and D’Annunzio’s “recovery” of Hellenistic Greece at the turn of the century. It examines three important moments in D’Annunzio’s literary career: his tour-de-force novel of scandal, Il piacere (Pleasure, 1889), his famous 1895 yachting tour of the Greek islands, and then the writing of Maia (1903), the first book of his epic poem in praise of empire, Le laudi (1903-1917). By reexaming these texts through a transnational lens, the essay demonstrates the global scope of the author's avant-garde literary project and considers its impact on colonial contexts across the Atlantic.Keywords: colonialismindigeneityfascismavant-gardeGreeceParaguay Notes1 As Renato Poggioli has described in his seminal text about radical twentieth-century art: “The avant-gardes turn their attention almost exclusively to negroid sculpture and the art of savages, prehistoric graffiti and pre-Columbian Indian art; they turn, in short, toward cultures remote in space and time, almost to pre-history itself. … the avant-garde can evaluate archaic traditions better than official art and conservative criticism can, if only by way of polemical reaction to the erroneous interpretations and evaluations of the academy” (Poggioli Citation1968: 55).2 More than one critic has noted, Sperelli was a barely disguised cipher for the author (Hughes-Hallett, Citation2013, 113–4).3 Francesco Paolo Michetti, for example, described a Nietzschean spiritual transformation, after D’Annunzio returned from Greece, saying that he sketched the first portrait of the artist as “superman:” “Ora, il Gabriele D’Annunzio rappresentato da quel pastello è un uomo tutto nuovo che sembra non avere più niente in comune con i ritratti precedenti. In questi ultimi, l’insieme della fisionomia è dolce, lo sguardo un po’ abbassato, i baffi modesti, con un sorriso vagamente malinconico. Al contrario, nel pastello, i tratti sono duri, i baffi si sollevano come lunghi uncini, la barbetta a punta minaccia, gli occhi sono aggressivi, le sopracciglia un po’ aggrottate. Quel pastello è certamente il primo ritratto di D’Annunzio ‘superuomo’” (Cited in Alatri, Citation1983, 164). An engraving of D’Annunzio aboard the yacht eventually adorned an early edition of his memoirs (Vittore Nardelli, Citation1931).4 As Martins observes, both Boggiani and then later Levi-Strauss were also under the influence of ideas that emanated from archaeology and were searching for the traces of previous or pre-modern civilizations in their ethnographic studies of Latin American indigenous (Marins 2017). Boggiani’s foundational study of the Caduveo indigenous, Viaggi D'un Artista Nell' America Meriodionale. I Caduvei (mbayá O Guaycurú), was published in the same year he toured Greece (Guido Boggiani and Colin, Citation1895).5 D’Annunzio’s record of the voyage of the Fantasy became available posthumously with a critical edition of his journals or Taccuini writing published by Mondadori in 1965. Mario Cimini has provided the most recent edition of these diaries and has further annotated the notes and diaries of the other travelers (Cimini Citation2010).6 The legacy and influence of Byron on Italian nationalism—and the conversion of liberal to fascist values of nationalism—has been widely studied. See Arnold Anthony Schmidt Citation2010, 179-816, and David Aberbach Citation2008, 478-497. Bu it is also worth observing that Mantegazza also saw ancient Greek cultures as sexually liberated. He moreover authored the first modern work of sexology, The Physiology of Love in 1873 (Mantegazza and Pireddu Citation2008), which D’Annunzio surely would have read.7 “Vale bene tutta la Grecia; per me vale anche di più perchè rappresenta l’Italia intera!”8 As he wrote to Hérelle, Laudi “una parte importante del poema è consacrata al viaggio in Grecia in cui mi foste compagno.” “Carteggio 562,” undated letter, approximately April 18, 1903.9 D’Annunzio completed the Laudi over the course of sixteen years, beginning in 1896 after his return from Greece, and then completing the last cycles of the poem in 1911 during the Italian war for a colony in Libya. On the relationship between epic poetry and empire, see Quint, Citation1993.Additional informationNotes on contributorsValerie McguireValerie McGuire is an Associate Professor of Instruction at the University of Texas at Austin. Her book Italy’s Sea: Empire and Nation in the Mediterranean, 1895-1945 (Liverpool University Press, 2020) retraces the history of discourses of Mediterranean-ness in Italian colonial rule of the Aegean. She is also co-editor of Italian Fascism in Rhodes and the Dodecanese, 1923-44 (Routledge, 2024) and author of other essays in the Journal of Romance Studies, California Italian Studies, and The Journal of Greek Social and Contemporary History, as well as book chapters on transnational approaches to Italian Studies.Correspondence to Valerie Mcguire. Email: vmcguire@utexas.edu