"Implications in the literary life of Lombroso"
Intervention Att. Salvatore Antonio in the Conference on "Genius and Madness", held in Ferrara at the Library on March 4, 2010 Ariostea
§ 1. Abstract.
My intervention, one must first, as a tribute for the Dante Alighieri Society, will highlight the relationship between the doctrines of Lombroso and literature, not only Italian, of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century and the "creative reuse" in the literature of these doctrines.
I will not, therefore, application of the legal thought of Lombroso, whose treatment would require un convegno a parte.
§2. Cesare Lombroso e la letteratura italiana del secondo Ottocento e del primo Novecento.
Uno degli aspetti meno noti di Cesare Lombroso è il suo amore per la letteratura, che si intrecciò in maniera indissolubile con la dedizione alla scienza.
Egli, invero, si occupò di temi letterari non solo nell'opera “L’Uomo di Genio”, ma in non pochi articoli di critica letteraria. Per un esempio, si ricordano quelli pubblicati sul “Fanfulla”, nonché una personale critica al romanzo “La Bestia umana” di Zola.
Lo stesso Lombroso si chiederà, all’apice della carriera, quando le sue opere avevano fatto il giro del mondo, why the criminal anthropology found a stronger presence than in the literature in science, how come "you accept the truth from fiction writers and not scientists."
He noted that while in the novel and drama in the old (except for Dante and Shakespeare), "the real lunatics and criminals do not appear again," taking care of the Writers in the symbol, tradition and declamation, "that the painting of people ", conversely, in the modern age, the findings seemed to anticipate criminal anthropology, or even reflect the profound aspirations of the great Russian writers, French, Swedish, from Balzac to Zola to Daudet, from Dostoevsky to Ibsen.
Dostoyevsky, indeed, describes him as "a real criminal anthropology," while in the novels of Zola, Lombroso admires "perfect description of what I call criminal epileptic vertigo, which is for me the background of the offender-born."
Lombroso believed in simple and popular dissemination of the new truths to expose a wide audience, as well as considered useful to the art of the novel, since it allowed the science to go beyond their own specialists and technicians.
To understand the spread of Lombroso also works at the non-specialist audience, read the speech of the writer Carlo Dossi (b. 1849 - m. 1910) about the fourth edition of "Genius and Madness": "if the number of issues we can learn a criterion value, or at least on the success of a work, it is certain that this Genius and Madness walks with great strides to fame" helped by the fact that some may be "a useful reading to everyone, because everyone has a grain, if not of genius, of madness is that we add a read dilettevolissima also - and this for the kind gentleman, a novel greedy and criminal record ergastolina "(1).
not forget that those were the years that came out in Milan for the types of Sonzogno, the opera "The processes famous image of all peoples" (una sorta di “Un giorno in Pretura” su carta stampata) e in cui usava recarsi a vedere la celebrazione dei processi in Corte d’Assise con la stessa (morbosa) curiosità e il medesimo interesse con cui ci si recava a teatro.
Potrebbe farsi un parallelo con quanto accade attualmente, rispetto alla scienza criminologica e medico legale, con le “fiction” televisive tipo “Bones”, “Law & Order”, “Cold Cases” e così via.
Non mancarono, tuttavia, coloro che ravvisarono nelle idee lombrosiane un atteggiamento di deprezzamento della cultura e dell'arte e ne criticarono la “problematica interdisciplinarietà”: tra essi, spicca Luigi Pirandello che, in un articolo apparso sulla rivista fiorentina “La nazione letteraria” del settembre del 1893 osservò: “ora che (…) Lombroso ha scritto un libro dal titolo Genio e Follia, nessuno più si fa scrupolo di penetrare con la lente del medico alienista nei dominii dell'arte”.
Così come la scrittura di Lombroso riflette la convinzione dell'utilità della divulgazione “popolare” nella sua discorsività e colloquialità (“L'Uomo di Genio” e “L'Uomo Delinquente”, possono davvero leggersi come romanzi), per la capacità di presentare i casi clinici, le anomalie dei delinquenti e dei folli, così il romanzo accoglie tematiche proprie delle sciences, and emphasizes the disturbing aspects of reality and pathological.
Although strongly criticized - even then - in theory, the doctrines of Lombroso therefore constitute the "tools of the trade of many writers of the second half of the nineteenth century and early decades of the next century, so that it has been effectively talked about "line fruit" or "receiving" represented by the creative reuse, in literature, theories of Lombroso (2).
Echoing the title of the conference, we note that "Genius and Madness" (which shares with "The Men's Delinquent" the primacy of the work of the scientist better known) is the text Lombroso - Built on the equation "genius equals disease" - more in line with the narrative of that period, not only Italian.
To stay in Italy, can not be denied as literature, in part, is inspired by the doctrines of Lombroso and as for the other party, is likely to find resonance Lombrosian steps to secure: just remember the novel "Fosca" (1869 ) Iginio Ugo Tarchetti, Malombra (1881) of Fogazzaro and "Viceroy" (1894) of Frederick De Roberto.
Still, how can it be denied that Franti De Amicis not show the stigmata of the "born guilty" and meadows, where you dwell sul risveglio del “bruto primordiale”, della “bestia” che è nell’uomo, tenga ben presente Lombroso (3)? Come è stato acutamente osservato (4), nel periodo in esame, in letteratura, la medicina aveva assunto il ruolo di “scienza guida”, tanto che “alcuni casi clinici descritti dal celebre Pinel, alienista a Bicetre, sembrano usciti addirittura dai romanzi di Balzac, così come i malati di Janet assomigliano ai personaggi di Zola”.
E’, pertanto, possibile parlare di “reciproca osmosi” tra il sapere psichiatrico dell’epoca e la letteratura, tanto che le idee e le tematiche di Lombroso si prestarono agevolmente a trasfigurarsi in “topoi” narrative, such as "natural evil", the "fatal predestination, organic to the crime," the psychosis of genius. "
Moreover, the same type of doctrine "degenerative" - \u200b\u200bthe 'humus' which will draw sap from the figure of the' man of genius "- is not that the natural product of the literary education of Lombroso romantic, Byronic-branded Foscolo , namely a design aesthetic that pushes the genre in literature and art to the domains of morbid decay, ugliness, taking away the power of beauty, in contrast to the evolutionary perspective, which then was the most popular.
Here, then, that there is an actual intervention of a psychiatrist, a scientist in the domains of literature, with emphasis on the pathological side of creative practice, seen as "madness", "trance", "sudden impulse" ( 2).
§ 3. "Genius and Madness."
E 'a work which, over the years has undergone a process of expansion, spreading from the hundreds of pages of the first edition of the Milan 1864 (in the form of introductory lesson to the course of psychiatric clinic held in Pavia) to seven hundred thirty-nine pages of the sixth edition of 1894, output from the publisher mouth with the title "Man of Genius. "
It contains an incredible amount of products (most of the time, "Borges' imaginary and manipulated), anecdotes and colorful novels about historical figures and what we today call the" intellectual "as diverse as Napoleon, Leopardi, Paganini, Pascal, Goethe , Cavour, Stuart Mill, Dumas, Baudelaire, Martin Luther, Beethoven, and even Jesus Christ, described in the grip of "auditory hallucinations".
There's also Dante: Lombroso noted that in the 'Inferno' are frequent falls (the most famous is that of the fifth canto of the Inferno, "and I fell like a dead body falls") as it is of epileptics, in "Purgatory" is dominated by visions, as is typical of sleepwalkers and "Paradise" ecstasy, just as the visionaries. About
visions of Purgatory, the analysis Lombrosian acquires color and thickness when set against what has been observed, more than eighty years later, in the splendid essay by Italo Calvino "Visibility", which is part of the "Memos" (5 ), in commenting on the twenty-fifth verse of Canto XVII of Purgatory "Then reigned within the high-fantasy": "(...) in the circle of the wrathful, (..) Dante contemplates that the images are formed directly in his mind, and are examples of classical and biblical wrath punished (...) in the various rounds of Purgatory (...) appear to Dante of the scenes are like citations or representations of examples of sins and virtues: the first form bas-reliefs that appear to move and speak, then as visions projected before his eyes, as items that come to his ear, and finally as a purely mental images. "
Lombroso (who examined eighteen verses of the Divine Comedy, Dante was claiming no doubt that epileptic) deduced it was neurotic and pathological epileptic seizure and always psychic and Dante: the founder of criminal anthropology speaks as if the poet had really stato nell’altro mondo in corpo e anima e, insomma, “scambia un lavoro d’arte o di fantasia con la realtà della vita” (6).
L’opera si basa sull’idea che “il genio, come il delitto, è una delle forme teratologiche della mente umana, una fra le varietà della pazzia” e che “i giganti del genio pagano il fio della loro potenza intellettuale con la degenerazione epilettica e colla follia”.
Anche in questo caso, l’impalcatura teorica è rappresentata dalla categoria, elevata a personale “Weltanschauung”, del “misoneismo” (l’odio – e la paura – del nuovo), primo strumento che “garantisce the permanence of life and that is found in all levels of being. "
prime example is the preface to the French edition of 1894's "Genius and Madness", written by Charles Richet: "Nature does not like exceptions, attempts to remove them, first of all cares about the uniformity of the breed. E 'essentially democratic and leveling. He does not like intellectuals, aristocrats, who are the brilliant spirit. Bear them forward, and his task and to include these irregular in the ranks. "
last Italian edition of "The Men of Genius" in 1894, Lombroso asserted that "novelists, writers, capture and who realize criminal anthropological discoveries, the great artists know how to represent real figures in bright, art awakens in us the consciousness of the truth. "
is why the art works with science, with the knowledge and the confirmation and inspiration, the literary and artistic works are almost a mirror and contain a prophecy of future science (7)
The deviant, the abnormal, the genius, are seen as agents of historical movement whose strength and explosive power are to be checked the "technical" (the scientist), which is the guarantor of the rule, to adjust, process, order.
orderly progress can only come from the tension between the misoneism as a factor equilibrium stabilizing element of breaking.
should however be noted that Lombroso, in keeping with their training romantic, does not demonize the figure of genius, nor ostracized as different, but looks at her with sympathetic eyes (2), so that, for the writer Federico De Roberto (8) will not be Lombroso, Max Nordau, but (the author of the famous opera "degeneration, which Lombroso, however, he dedicated" The Men's Delinquent ", calling him an" apostle of the new school in Europe ") an" enemy of art. "
"Genius and Madness", has recently been graphically compared with the "stock of a tailor shop Mossy teatrale, alla disordinata bottega di un trovarobe”, rigurgitando “di ciarpame, costumi ridicoli e sdruciti e di oggetti sgangherati e polverosi”. Tuttavia “qua e là si riesce pur sempre a trovare qualcosa di curioso” (9).
E’, probabilmente, ciò che si può affermare in relazione all’intera teoria lombrosiana, al di là degli opposti atteggiamenti o incondizionatamente entusiasti (10) o, all’opposto, incondizionatamente critici (11).
Avv. Antonio Salvatore
Note:
1)Dossi C., “Genio e Follia”, in “La Riforma”, Roma, 11 marzo 1882;
2)Rondini A, “La ricezione letteraria di Cesare Lombroso nell’Ottocento”;
3)anche se va detto che Pascoli respinse il determinismo lombrosiano e, contro ogni fatalismo, sostenne l’esistenza del libero arbitrio, visto come “la macchina con cui gli uomini fabbricano il proprio avvenire” (letture tenute a Messina nel 1901 e a Pisa nel 1905);
4)Cavalli Pasini A., “La scienza del romanzo”, Bologna 1982 e Ellenberger H.F., “Histoire de la découverte de l’incosnscient”, Paris, 1994;
5)Calvino I, “Visibilità”, in “Lezioni americane – Sei proposte per il prossimo millennio”, Milano, 2009, p. 91;
6)De Leonardis G., Dante isterico, in "Dante Journal", Roma-Venezia, 1895 p. 211;
7) Frigessi D., "Science and Literature: Cesare Lombroso and some writers of the century."
8) F. De Roberto, "An enemy of art", in "Corriere della Sera on 24 December 1897;
9) Guarnieri L.," The Atlas criminal - reckless life of Cesare Lombroso, "Milan, 2000 , p. 163 et seq;
10), refers to Bulferetti L., author of a celebrated biography of Cesare Lombroso, "Cesare Lombroso, Turin, 1975;
11) the same Guarnieri L," op. cit. and G. Colombo, "Science unhappy", Torino, 1975.
Mr. Antonio Salvatore