New Italian Epic is a definition suggested by the Italian literary group Wu Ming Foundation to describe a body of literary works written in Italy by various authors starting in 1993, at the end of the so called 'First Republic'. This body of works is described as being formed of novels and other literary texts, which share various stylistic characteristics, thematic constants, and an underlying allegorical nature. They are a particular kind of metahistorical fiction, with peculiar features that derive from the Italian context.Cf. C. Boscolo, "Scardinare il Postmoderno. Etica e metastoria nel New Italian Epic" , www.carmillaonline.com, 29 April 2008
Origin of the definition
The definition was made by Italian writers collectively known as Wu Ming in March 2008, during the work on 'Up Close & Personal', a seminar on contemporary Italian literature held at McGill University in Montreal, Canada.
Over the next few days the writers proposed and discussed the expression in debates at other North American colleges, including Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, within the context of the programme of Comparative Media Studies directed by Henry Jenkins.Cf. The podcast section of the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program , Cambridge, Massachusetts
From these interventions the author drew the essay New Italian Epic. Memorandum 1993-2008: narrative, oblique gaze, return to the future, published online in the spring of the same year.Text of the essay published on the site Carmilla on line , also called "Memorandum on the New Italian Epic". During the whole of 2008 the expression found a vast echo online, in conferences and conventions, in newspapers, in the specialist press and in radio broadcasts.For a general overview of the online debate, cf. The section 'New Italian Epic' on the site carmillaonline.com; articles on the New Italian Epic have been published in various daily newspapers and literary magazines. The Italian Radio 3 popular programme "Fahrenheit" has dedicated programmes to the discussion on 14 May 2008 and 11 June 2008. In Italy, too, Wu Ming 1 put forward the expression 'New Italian Epic' [NIE] in English.The author has explained the motive in an interview: 'in English, because I was addressing a heterogeneous and multinational audience, and also because it gives the idea of minimum detachment necessary to understand what is happening in Italian culture. You have to get out of yourself a bit, from the usual shared perceptive field, and climb onto an elevation (in reality all you need is a little hill) to see the swarm of people, things, information.' Loop magazine, n.0, December 2008
In late 2008 Wu Ming put online a version of the Memorandum marked '2.0', or annotated and extended, with replies to some criticisms and closer examination of the more controversial points.
In January 2009 the series Stile Libero of the Einaudi publishing house published a further enriched and updated version of the Memorandum ('3.0'), entitled New Italian Epic. Literatures, oblique gazes, returns to the future.
The "memorandum"
The Memorandum was intended as an "open suggestion of comparative reading, an album of notes to be borne in mind, remembered, used"Cf. Preface to edition 2.0 of New Italian Epic, September 2008, p.1. and suggests that attention should be paid to a group of works written in Italy over the past fifteen years (1993–2008), seeking unexpected similarities or, conversely, dissolving connections too often taken for grantedCf. The paragraph "La nebulosa" [The Nebula], in New Italian Epic., cit., p. 7 of the version in pdf format.
The Memorandum has also been describedPaolo Di Stefano, «Ecco il manifesto della 'Nuova Epica'», Corriere della Sera, 13 May 2008, p.38. as a literary manifesto, by virtue of the fact that it contains a classification. According to the author and other participants in the debate,Cf. note III ("Opere"), New Italian Epic, p. 7 of the version in pdf format; G. Pispisa, "Riflessioni sul New Italian Epic", carmillaonline.com, 1 September 2008; M. Amici, "Il fronte davanti agli occhi", intervention at the conference "The Italian Perspective on Metahistorical Fiction: The New Italian Epic", Institute of Germanic and Romance Studies, University of London, UK, 2 October 2008. the term 'manifesto' is misleading, because this is a document in the form of a pamphlet that does not herald a movement of authors or prescribe anything, but describes a posteriori a dialogue between already existing books, delineating the characteristics of a series of works that go beyond post-modernism, 'NIE is only one of the many, good and different things that are happening today in Italian literature', as the preface to edition 2.0 puts it.
Characteristics
The characteristics of NIE listed in the memorandum are seven in number, preceded by some premisses seen as a conceptual framework. These premisses concern historical and geographical specificities: this part of the memorandum describes in broad brushstrokes the social and cultural context in which the works are born, and to which explicit or allegorical references are made.
The seven characteristics identified by Wu Ming 1 are:
Refusal of the detached and "coldly ironic tone" that predominates in the postmodern novel."The works of the New Italian Epic do not lack humour, but they reject the detached and coldly ironic tone of postmodernist pastiche. This particular form of irony is what is in my view persistently abused: irony as forced currency, screened-off and affect-free, typical of postmodernism in its terminal phase." New Italian Epic 2.0, September 2008, p. 13. This first characteristic is defined in the memorandum as a 'conditio sine qua non'. 'Oblique gaze' or 'unforeseeable point of view'. Experimentation with unusual and unexpected looks. A gaze that sometimes widens out vertiginously to span the non-human as an integral part of the narrative. Underlying these experiments, according to Wu Ming 1, is an ethical and political motivation.«The use of "unfamiliar" points of view, if it is motivated and not reduced to a mere trick, is an inescapable taking of an ethical position. We are intoxicated by the use of 'normal', prescribed points of view, put in focus for us by the ideology of the ruling class. It is imperative to purify oneself, to try and see the world in different ways, surprising ourselves.» New Italian Epic 2.0, September 2008, p. 14. Narrative complexity united with a 'pop' attitude that often leads to popular success. Many of these novels, are, according to Wu Ming 1, structurally complex and complex in terms of their content, and yet they have become best-sellers. Some examples are Q by Luther Blissett, Romanzo Criminale by Giancarlo de Cataldo, L’ottava vibrazione by Carlo Lucarelli and especially Gomorrah by Roberto Saviano. Narratives of alternative histories and 'potential uchronias'. These narratives offer a different possible solution with regard to historical reality. Dissimulated linguistic experimentation aimed at subverting 'from within' the register of the prose.«In NIE there is a great deal of stylistic and linguistic experimentation, but in most cases it is "channeled" into the story, it serves to tell the story better. Some write in verses, some invent languages and idiolects, some fracture syntax, some obsessively use outmoded rhetorical figures [...], some "amputate" certain elements that have been wrongly considered indispensable (such as pronominal particles). All of this, however, corresponds to precise expressive demands, its pole star is not the "beautiful page", the phrase that shouts to the world: "How well written I am!" Wu Ming 1, interview in Loop magazine, cit. Unidentified narrative objects (UNO). Not only do many of the texts of the body under examination not fall within any predefined literary genre, they widen the confines of the literary to include textual elements that produce 'disturbing' effects. Among the books quoted in the memorandum, Asce di guerra by Wu Ming, Sappiano le mie parole di sangue by Babsi Jones and the aforementioned Gomorrah.«They are books that appear disturbing today, and apparently external or eccentric in relation to the consolidated idea of the novel, but which in future we will probably call "novels" without hesitation. Today there is a reserve about calling Gomorrah a "novel", on the one hand for fear of stripping it of its power of witness and denunciation, on the other because as a novel... it seems not to work, you don’t know where it starts or where it finishes, you don’t know how to take it, it's journalistic and it's literary, but what is journalistic? And what is literary? I think this reserve and this stammering will dissolve over time', Wu Ming 1, interview in Loop magazine, cit. After Gomorrah'''s international success, many reviewers cited such acronyms as NIE and UNO in an attempt at describing Saviano's book. Writing about Gomorrah on Hindustan Times, Indian author Indrajit Hazra observed that "unlike Truman Capote's "fact+fiction=faction" and its obsessive hankering for details, the UNO slithers about like a beast, sometimes trodding the path of hard reportage, sometimes flipping over into personal mutterings, sometimes tripping on philosophical ruminations, sometimes diving into novelistic "voices" and sometimes gearing into social theory. And unlike Hunter S. Thompson's 'gonzo journalism', it's dead serious. The UNO's only purpose is to get us reacting violently on a subject using all the tricks known in the narrating trade.""Journalism and a bit more", Hindustan Times, 1 November 2008 Community and 'transmedia'. The texts of NIE have the characteristic that they often acts as basic texts for the creation of spin-offs by fan communities. These spin-offs are often present online, and involve various media (films, telefilms, television series, comics, video games, musical compositions, websites).
To this list, with version 2.0 of the memorandum and interventions by other writers and academics,For example the way the sociologist Claudio Coletta traces and examines the figure of the "Survivor" in the works of NIE:, "Storie di sopravvissuti", in carmillaonline.com, 10 December 2008. were added thematic constants that may be found in NIE texts, for example the 'death of the founder': many books in the 'nebula' describe the consequences of the passing of a clan leader or founding father, a figure who represented a world that is now in crisis, or has actually constructed a world but has not prepared his descendants to manage the crisis it falls into. By coincidence, in various books this character was identified with the simple antonomasia 'the old man'. According to Wu Ming 1, upon this mythologeme NIE constructs a great allegory of the current historical phase.cf. Wu Ming 1, New Italian Epic 2.0, cit.; Wu Ming 1, "We're Going to Have to Be the Parents", intervention at IGRS, University of London, 2 October 2008.
In the memorandum, the catalogue of NIE characteristics is followed by a reflection on allegory, which flows into an exhortation to imagine the future and the extinction of the human species with an approach that the author defines as 'ecocentric', and describes as a 'systematic recourse' to the rhetorical figure of the pathetic fallacy, i.e. the attribution to inanimate objects and creatures without consciousness of thoughts and emotions equal to those of human beings.
The debate in the Italian media and in the cultural world
Contributions and interventions by other writers
The appearance of the memorandum has unleashed, from April 2008, a vast discussion amongst writers, as well as among writers and readers. Online or in the pages of some newspapers (such as L'Unità, La Repubblica, Liberazione and Il Manifesto) almost all the authors mentioned by Wu Ming 1 have taken a position on the subject.