Si propone un’anticipazione del fascicolo monografico su Mario Pomilio, il n. 49, che raccoglie gli Atti della Giornata di Studi dal titolo Mario Pomilio studioso, promossa dal Comitato nazionale per le celebrazioni del centenario della nascita di Mario Pomilio (1921-2021) e tenutasi il 21 marzo 2023 a Vercelli, presso la sede di Palazzo Tartara dell’Università del Piemonte Orientale:
Letture critiche
Prefazione, di Cecilia Gibellini
Le “Contestazioni” di Mario Pomilio: filologia e filosofia, di Carlo Caccia e Gioele Cristofari
Abstract: In the 1960s, Mario Pomilio experienced a period of creative crisis that forced him away from creating fictional works. However, in the same period, the writer from Orsogna did not remain intellectually immobile: alongside his academic production dedicated to Pirandello and Verga, in 1967 Pomilio published Contestazioni, a collection of militant essays in which he reacted against various aesthetic-philosophical positions present in the post-war Italian literary field, in particular those adopted by the Gruppo 63. Our paper aims to examine Pomilio’s “contestations” by testing their argumentative forcefulness and methodological rigor. In the first paragraph, we will analyze the Abruzzese writer’s polemic against the conception of naturalism adopted by Renato Barilli and Angelo Guglielmi; in this regard, we will observe Pomilio’s call for a problematic and not naive historicisation of literary currents. In the second paragraph, we will examine the aesthetic-philosophical deconstructions of the neo-avant-garde positions proposed by Pomilio. These critiques are combined with an appeal for the adoption of a historicist perspective quite different from the one promoted by Marxist aesthetics because Pomilio’s positions seem more similar to those adopted by the great European philological tradition of the 20th century. In the conclusion, we will observe how the critical laboratory of Contestazioni preluded Pomilio’s return to literature.
Pomilio, Petrarca e l’humanitas, di Cecilia Gibellini
Abstract: The novelist, critic and thinker Mario Pomilio embarked during his youth an academic career: after graduating at the University of Pisa (with a thesis on Pirandello), he was a scholarship holder in Brussels and Paris, where, between 1950 and 1952, he worked on an ambitious research project concerning the aesthetics of furor and the divine nature of poetic inspiration from the Middle Ages to the XIXth century. Within this vast project, he worked on a study on Petrarch’s aesthetics that remained unpublished for many decades, until the monograph edited by Cecilia Gibellini in 2016. Pomilio’s essay, broad and solid although not entirely completed, is very interesting and original in exploring Petrarch’s aesthetics, its original synthesis of classical and Christian values, its vision of poetry as a privileged instrument for revealing the truth. The essay remained unpublished, but its reflection on Petrarch’s aesthetics, and more generally on the meaning and the value of literature, was decisive in Pomilio’s “conversion” to fiction writing: it was also due to this experience that he recognized his own vocation, becoming a writer without ever giving up the attitude of the scholar and the thinker.
Gli “scritti cristiani” di Mario Pomilio: le parole della letteratura e l’incontro con la Parola, di Giuseppe Langella
Abstract: The contribution deals only with the Rusconi edition (1979) of the Scritti cristiani, born close to Il quinto evangelio, leaving out the additions proposed by Marco Beck in the posthumous edition of 2014. Clearly, Pomilio wants to underline the very close relationship that binds, genetically, the Scritti cristiani to Il quinto evangelio, making us think of a derivation of both works, the narrative one as well as the non-fiction one, from a single matrix. It is nothing strange, then, that the path underlying the assembly of the 14 Scritti cristiani ends precisely in that Preistoria di un romanzo in which Pomilio recalls the suggestions and intentions that had accompanied the flashing genesis and the slow elaboration of his masterpiece. In short, Pomilio gives the impression of wanting to tell us, with a similar layout, through which personal events and profound convictions he came to conceive and develop the idea and project of a work of the highest testimony such as Il quinto evangelio, authentic summa of his religious conception, interpreting the ferment of the post-conciliar season. The stages of this journey are divided in a rigorous and perfectly regular manner into three blocks of equal consistency: we start with four letters, addressed respectively to the father, to the daughter, to a friend and to a nun, which fall within the author’s biography and they reveal the most intimate and human sides, the internal experiences, the episodes that have marked one’s life, the intentions and movements of conscience; then come four reflections that outline Pomilio’s Christian vision, or his way of understanding and living the religious dimension; and, behind it, four other writings that look at the Bible and in particular at the Vangeli as a model of both literature and holiness.
L’accadere nella storia. Pomilio saggista da Manzoni al secondo Ottocento, di Fabio Pierangeli
Abstract: The reference to Manzoni constitutes a constant variable but firm over time in Pomilio’s literary career, on the essayistic and creative fields, with the masterpiece of Il Natale del 1833, Premio Strega of 1983. On the essayistic side, the intervention aims to verify the presence of Manzoni, mostly as a model no longer reproducible in a changed historical context, especially with respect to fundamental thematic issues such as evil in history and the possibility/impossibility of pietas, in the analysis of realism and De Roberto, for which the condemnation society has no use for it «come per esempio al Manzoni, a far piovere pietà sugli individui, ancor meno a cercare un contrappeso in una ragione storica o in una trascendenza».
Lontano «dai lidi del puro letterario»: Mario Pomilio critico quotidiano, di Paola Villani
Abstract: In his “obsessive” attention to the genesis of writing and to the “situations” from which the pages of literature (critical as well as artistic) are born, in his interest in the «mondo intenzionale dell’autore», Pomilio has come to weave a dense inferential network between the paths of creation and those of reception. This study aims to cover some stages of Pomilio «che legge tanto bene», as Italo Calvino said. It then goes through the author’s journalistic career with specific reference to the profile of a newspaper critic. The multiplicity of the different writings seems to condense in a strict circularity between the textual morphologies, with particular reference to the article form. Following the path of the “pieces” that precede or follow the volumes (or which are deliberately excluded from the volumes) we encounter the «scrittore nelle sue operazioni»; a “metapomilio”, one might say. These are not just generative moments: the critic’s exercise deliberately chooses the form of the brief intervention, an autonomous, reasoned textual morphology, of which the volume is often merely a collection. A precise choice of method.
Recensioni (a cura della Redazione)
Massimiliano Tortora, La svolta del 1929. Prima e dopo Gli indifferenti di Alberto Moravia (2023), di Niccolò Amelii