Us and the sense of emptiness. What 150 years of Manzoni teach Italy

We are publishing an extract from the speech delivered today, Monday 22 May, in Milan, on the occasion of the day of celebrations for the 150th anniversary of the death of Alessandro Manzoni, by Professor Giovanni Bazoli, honorary president of the Fondazione Centro Nazionale Studi Manzoni.

Alessandro Manzoni lived for sixty years in this house which was a witness of affections, joys and sorrows, but also a laboratory of thought and very high poetic intuitions. Manzoni is traditionally placed in the “canon” of Italian literature in a central position next to Dante, because his work contributed decisively to the construction and diffusion of the Italian language. And language was a decisive factor in national unification. The Betrothed is the great historical novel, the model par excellence of the unitary language, on which generations of Italians have learned to write and think. Almost a secular Bible, in which Italians of all social levels and of all faiths are recognized or in any case mirrored. Here, in this house, an excited Giuseppe Verdi met the composer he admired and almost revered on 30 June 1868, to whom he would later dedicate the immortal Requiem. Manzoni was a point of reference in various phases of our national history. (…)

Here I intend to draw attention to the circumstances and reasons which seem instead to indicate the reactivation of an interest, both literary and civil and moral, in Manzoni’s work. This re-emergence, after a long karstic flow, of attention for Manzoni is a completely recent novelty. The occasion was the dramatic juncture of the pandemic. It was 26 February 2020 when, with the lockdown not yet proclaimed, the principal of a scientific high school in Milan, first of all, wrote a letter to his students inviting them to read Alessandro Manzoni, specifically chapters 31 and 32 of the Betrothed: “In those pages”, he warned, “there is already everything: the idea of ​​the danger of foreigners, the violent clash between the authorities, the spasmodic search for the so-called patient zero, the contempt for the experts, the hunt for the spreaders, the uncontrolled rumors , the most absurd remedies, the health emergency”.

Also in this case, as in Manzoni’s seventeenth century, Milan was an “outpost” of suffering severely hit by an invisible enemy. In such a dramatic situation that principal was able to immediately identify in literature, and in science, route indicators to navigate the storm.

It is therefore in Italy wounded by Covid that Manzoni finds many of the so-called “ordinary readers”, who rediscover it as their own heritage. Indeed, Manzoni is unparalleled in describing the presence of evil and corruption in human history. “A sense of universal catastrophe” hovers in many pages of the Promessi Sposi – even if the crudest representations are found in the Fermo and Lucia, a work with a more marked Jansenist approach – “involving not only the faults of men, in the misfortunes and mourning that they carry with them, but even nature” (Bàrberi Squarotti).

Publishing, an antenna ready to pick up the signals of the contemporary, has perceived this new attention to Manzoni and, thanks to the expiry of the anniversary of his death, has reprinted significant texts from the past and has published works by new authors not belonging to the academy, nor to the circle of literary professionals. Furthermore, the recent publication in America of the new translation of the Betrothed, costing more than ten years of work to Michael Moore, former translator of Primo Levi, was greeted with admiration by overseas critics, including the Wall Street Journal, and produced the online birth of novel reading circles.

This is what is happening: today’s man feels again the need to know the outcomes – the poetic ones and the existential ones, the solved ones and the problematic ones – of the great research that occupied Manzoni’s entire life and which is at the center of his work: research on justice and human history, that is, on justice that is not realized in human history. In extreme terms: earthly justice considered “impossible”.

A pessimism that Manzoni expressed in a radical way in the “History of the infamous column”. (…) The presence of evil in human history (“great” history of peoples and “small” history of individuals), i.e. the predominance of the strong and wicked over the humble and honest, is at the center of Manzoni’s reflections and is also the leitmotif, almost nagging, of the novel. But the pathos of this meditation is greatly increased by the question of whether this human condition can be reconciled with trust in divine Providence.

The presence of evil in the world in fact requires the believer to reflect not only on human justice but also on divine justice. In Manzoni we find terrible words in this regard (far from prudence and calculation, far from the champion of apologetic rhetoric!). The “meek” Manzoni raises this cry: “Thought finds itself with horror led to hesitate between two blasphemies which are two delusions: denying Providence or accusing it”.

Manzoni’s greatness manifests itself precisely in the fact that he investigates evil and injustice in history from two opposing visions: the “secular” and rational one (pessimistic, almost desperate) and the religious one (which conceives Providence as a universal order that includes time and eternity). Manzoni’s tormented itinerary leads to a mystery in which believers and non-believers can recognize each other. Returning to this house we feel the comfort of a loud and inspired voice, which helps us to overcome the sense of emptiness, due to the lack of ideal references, which characterizes the world in which we live.