Dead Asor Rosa, critic and militant between politics and culture – Corriere.it

It was certainly not a personality that could leave indifferent, Alberto Asor Rosa. He had as many friends as enemies. Very faithful friends, such as Eugenio Scalfari, who asked him to introduce his Meridian. And particularly fierce enemies. He was, first and perhaps more than a scholar, a militant critic (and irritating for many). Born in 1933 in Rome, Circonvallazione Nomentana, to Assunta Fogliuzzi, of popular extraction (her foundling father had been adopted), and to Alessandro, a railway employee, of anarcho-socialist family of Bolognese origin. In Assunta and Alessandro (2010) Asor reconstructed the story of the parents, while ne The dawn of a new world (2002), who belatedly revealed him to be a narrator (to his own surprise), had recounted his Roman childhood. That strange mirror-like surname was invented by one of his ancestor, who thus, around 1820, intended to distinguish a natural child from the legitimate ones. A “palindrome” to which Montale wanted to dedicate a satirical poem (“Asor, gentle name / its retrograde / is the most beautiful flower…”). He taught in high schools for about ten years and then Italian literature at Sapienza: in 1977, students wrote on the walls of the university «Asor Rosa sei un palindrome» (word readable from left to right and vice versa) in mockery of his declaring himself a Marxist and actually be a man of power (the baronial trait would have often been reproached).

At Sapienza, Asor had been a student, immediately close to the social-communist group of Rinascita and then enrolled in the Youth Federation of the PCI, with which he would later have tormented relationships. He had graduated with Natalino Sapegno (ungaretti co-supervisor) presenting a thesis on Vasco Pratolini. It was precisely on Pratolini’s neorealism that lively controversies arose at the release of Metellus (1958), and Asor Rosa will not hesitate to side with Muscetta, who framed the novel in the area of ​​sentimental narrative rather than in the historical-social one, an opinion supported by Salinari.

«Mondo worker» to begin with, later «Mondo Nuovo» and «Quaderni Rossi», the periodical with a workerist tendency, of which he was the founder: these were the years of collaborations with magazines and friendships with Raniero Panzieri, Massimo Cacciari, Mario Tronti, Tony Negri. Years in which the polemical and dialectical qualities of Asor Rosa leapt to the fore. Surprisingly, in 1964 we find him at the meeting of Group 63 in Reggio Emilia, where he establishes a close (and lasting) relationship with Umberto Eco. But the bitterest discussion would emerge shortly thereafter, when Samonà and Savelli in 1965 published the book by him destined to remain most famous, Writers and people, an investigation into populism in the Italian novel: the essay took the form of a denunciation of left-wing culture, aimed at exploiting literature for the purposes of a banal political consensus. To the populist (and ideological) orientation that elevated the people to myth and in particular to Gramsci’s idea of ​​national-popular literature, Asor Rosa contrasted the experience of bourgeois writers capable of experiencing the crisis of their class to the fullest. The names were those of Verga, Svevo, Montale, Gadda and partly Pirandello, but on the European side Asor had already written an important essay on Thomas Mann. The paradox was that starting from workerist positions, Asor Rosa came to re-evaluate European «big bourgeois literature» which, unlike post-war Italian literature, represented the tragedies and wounds of contemporary society. The frontal attack was on Carlo Salinari, who had theorized the transition from neorealism to realism and who overturned the accusation of being a «petty bourgeois» on his former pupil.

A political impulse always presides over the incursions of the critic and the historian of literature: a constant questioning on the problems of the contemporary world, on the function of the intellectual, on his relationship with society and the world. The results of this mentality will be seen above all in the essays of the most fiery decade: Intellectuals and the working class (1973), The culture of the Counter-Reformation (1974), The two companies (1977), a collection of second-hand writings which as a whole represents a reflection on the crisis as “the sum of the elements that prevent this system from maintaining its past equilibrium”. It is not surprising that for Asor he attributes many of the elements that caused the crisis in Italian society and politics to «us»: «we the workers’ movement, we communist party, we workers’ and students’ struggles». Already contained, those short essays, a peculiar idea of ​​Italian identity (not only literary) marked, by secular tradition, by a “separation between rulers and ruled” much clearer than elsewhere, therefore by a fragmentation that made it impossible to recognize oneself in a collectivity. Not by chance in the weighty volume titled Genus italicum (1997) Italian literary history, from Boccaccio to Guicciardini to Verga to Collodi to Calvino, is covered as such a multifaceted entity as to make the attempt to define a canon almost vain and the adoption of the concept of “national gene” more pertinent instead .

The question on intellectuals culminates in a book-interview edited by Simonetta Fiori (The great silence of 2009), in which the theme of change and the decline of that link between politics and culture that has characterized the history of united Italy is tackled with an evident sense of despondency. Hence, according to Asor Rosa, the dissolution of the very idea of ​​the intellectual with its substantial silence. Regardless of the literary field and in the wake of an increasingly negative vision of the fate of the world, the pamphlet released in the aftermath of the Gulf War should be remembered, Out of the West or reasoning on the Apocalypse (1992). However, the growing pessimism was not enough to make him lose faith in literature as a factor in the “transformation of the world”, as noted by Corrado Bologna introducing the Meridian of Asor Rosa, emphasizing the critic’s increasingly convinced esteem for Italo Calvino as an example of style and at the same time of ethical and civil tension.

At the center of the political-cultural activity of Asor Rosa, critic and scholar, who has lived through variable phases and not always consistent with the starting assumptions, there is an imposing editorial laboratory: the building site of the Italian literature Einaudi, which since 1982 has occupied almost two decades of work and produced numerous historical and thematic volumes. In the multifaceted layout of the work, the most recognizable imprint is in that interweaving of history and geography suggested in a famous essay by Carlo Dionisotti. All in all an unexpected choice. However, it must be said that Asor Rosa, in his latest writings, did not hesitate to express his adherence to philology as a finally non-ideological reading approach: which accounts for the intimate (and perhaps radical) transformation of his critical vision.

The narrator was a surprise, even more surprises: last, in 2017, the erotic sequence of Suspended loves. But she expressed herself perhaps at her best in the 2005 «bestiary» (Stories of animals and other living things), a “Noah’s ark in domestic format” (the dog, the cat, you and me…) which is exalted not in words but in telepathic communication. For an intellectual who had staked everything on ratio and on the speech, a good leap (feline).

The reactions of friends and opponents: «Rigorous, lucid»

Many reactions to the death of Alberto Asor Rosa. This is how Minister Gennaro Sangiuliano recalls him on Twitter: «Rigorous academic and great scholar of Italian literature, profound investigator of the twentieth century. Today is a sad day for our culture.” In his tweet, Vittorio Sgarbi, Undersecretary of Culture, writes: «Asor Rosa was not a friend of mine. We have collided several times. But I want to remember him and recognize his extraordinary civic commitment. He united us in the battle for the defense of the Landscape ». Former Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte also tweeted: “Italy is losing the voice of rigorous research, of an authoritative exponent of our literary and political culture.” The Democratic Party Gianni Cuperlo writes on Facebook: «I really loved some essays by Asor Rosa, most recently the very lucid reflection on Machiavelli and Italy. I wrote a review and his next phone call is among the memories I have with me». The mayor of Rome Roberto Gualtieri: «Asor Rosa was an extraordinary intellectual who with his writings and his commitment brought prestige to the country and to Rome». On Facebook, voices from the world of culture. For Bruno Arpaia: «Hello, Alberto. We will no longer go under the Iguazu Falls together…” For Renzo Paris: “I still remember the voice of him suffering from him when he told me that his relatives and those of the PCI had turned upside down over his first book”. And from Sapienza, the post with the words of the rector Antonella Polimeni: «The Faculty of Letters and Philosophy was his home for 52 years».

Bibliography. Literary essays, fiction and controversy

The name of Alberto Asor Rosa is linked to his first important essay of literary criticism,
Writers and people
(Samonà and Savelli, 1965), which was followed by a very large production. He had cured the
Italian literature Einaudi
in 16 volumes (1982-2000) and published a
Summary of the history of Italian literature
(The New Italy, 1979). Also worth noting
Genus italicum

(Einaudi, 1997), the
European history of Italian literature
in three volumes
(Einaudi, 2009), Weapons of Criticism (Einaudi, 2011), Machiavelli and Italy (Einaudi, 2019). Also for Einaudi Asor Rosa had published essays on political current affairs such as
The two companies
(1977) and
Out of the West
(1992) and his fiction books: The dawn of a new world (2002); Stories of animals and other living things (2005); Suspended loves (2017).