‘Una verità totale’: The Textual and Visual Encounter With the Other in Franco Fortini’s Asia Maggiore. Viaggio nella Cina

ABSTRACTThe article explores the photo-textual form of Franco Fortini’s Asia Maggiore. Viaggio nella Cina, the travel account published in 1956 following the writer’s trip to socialist China in 1955. I will discuss the interaction between the photographs taken by the author during the journey and the text. The issue of the literary genre will also be examined, investigating the nature of the travel journal as a combination of both a descriptive account and an autobiographical diary. I will then discuss how this photo-textual blend functions both theoretically – by analysing the nature of the photographic medium in relation with the text – and practically – by providing examples of the ekphrastic interaction of the two media in Fortini’s icastic depiction of colours and crowds. The allegorical value of the account of socialist China is then brought into question, with particular focus on the use of comparison as an argumentative strategy.KEYWORDS: Franco FortiniPhoto-texttravel literatureallegoryWalter Benjamin AcknowledgmentsThe research for this article took place during a period of study at the University of Cambridge and included a visit to the Centro Interdipartimentale di Ricerca Franco Fortini at the University of Siena in April 2022. Many thanks to Dr. Erica Bellia for the precious advice given to me while working on this essay.Disclosure StatementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Notes1 Franco Fortini, Asia Maggiore. Viaggio nella Cina (Turin: Einaudi, 1956).2 The process of normalisation of the relationships between Italy and China began shortly after 1949 and culminated in 1970 with the official Italian recognition of the People’s Republic (Carla Meneguzzi Rostagni, ‘Diplomazia a più voci. La questione cinese nella politica estera italiana (1949–1971)’, in La Cina di Mao, l’Italia e l’Europa negli anni della Guerra fredda, ed. by Carla Meneguzzi Rostagni and Guido Samarani Bologna: Il Mulino, 2014, pp. 17–54 (p. 18). For a broader picture of the diplomatic relationships between European countries and the People’s Republic of China during the Cold War years, see Modern Asian Studies 51/1 (2017), special issue ‘Circumventing the Cold War: The parallel diplomacy of economic and cultural exchanges between Western Europe and Socialist China in the 1950s and 1960s’ [accessed 6 June 2023].3 Besides Fortini’s book, other important outcomes of the diplomatic journey were Cassola’s report Viaggio in Cina (1956) and the special issue of Il ponte, the journal founded by Calamandrei in 1945, entitled ‘La Cina d’oggi’ (1956).4 A description of the journey can be found in Michelangelo Cocurullo, La cortina di bambù. La Cina nei reportages italiani della seconda metà del Novecento (Sestri Levante: Gammarò, 2007), p. 16. Cocurullo highlights the highly formalised and controlled nature of such visits: ‘Un dato preliminare comunque da sottolineare è che, come tutti i viaggi organizzati dai Cinesi in gruppi-delegazioni, gli itinerari sono rigorosamente pianificati: alle richieste dei visitatori le autorità cinesi hanno pronte alternative validamente preselezionate e gli eventuali contatti con persone non appartenenti ad istituzioni avvengono esclusivamente sotto stretta autorizzazione’ (Cocurullo, La cortina di bambù, p. 16).5 In April 2022, I visited the photographic archive related to the trip, containing all the photographs that were not selected for the book. The material is stored in the Centro Interdipartimentale di Ricerca Franco Fortini at the University of Siena, Fondo Fortini F6 – Cina – 710-928. Before continuing, a disclaimer must be put forward, outlining the difference in layout between the 1956 original version and the 2007 re-edition of the book: the 1956 print shows the photographs as selected and organised in the book by Fortini himself, whilst the 2007 reprint moves them into a single section in the middle of the book. Furthermore, the main cover of the original edition displays a portrait of an Asian girl taken by Werner Bischof whilst the back cover features a portrait of Fortini in China, both of which are absent from the reprinted version. The theoretical reading of this article, focused on the photo-textual asset of the book, is based on its original 1956 edition. Conversely, the quotations of written text with their related page numbers have been taken from the 2007 edition due to its wider availability, in order to facilitate the reader’s consultation of the cited segments.6 Alfonso Berardinelli, Franco Fortini (Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1973), p. 40.7 Romano Luperini, Il futuro di Fortini (San Cesario di Lecce: Manni, 2007), p. 22. On salaried intellectuals at Olivetti, see Jim Carter, ‘Salaried Intellectuals: Fortini, Giudici, Ottieri, Volponi, and Buzzi at the Olivetti Company’, Italian Culture, 37 (2019), 47–63 . On Fortini’s poetic fracture with his hermetic origins and the subsequent post-war turn and generally for a close comment to Poesia e errore, see Francesco Diaco, Dialettica e speranza. Sulla poesia di Franco Fortini (Macerata: Quodlibet Studio, 2017), pp. 127–181.8 Franco Fortini. Saggi ed epigrammi, ed. by Luca Lenzini (Milan: Mondadori, 2003), p. xcviii.9 Berardinelli, Franco Fortini, p. 45. On the interest of the New Left towards socialist China, see at least Daniele Perotti, ‘Il mito cinese nella nuova sinistra italiana (1960–1970)’, Il Politico, Vol. 46, No. 1/2 (1981), 223–280 [accessed 5 June 2023].10 Franco Fortini, Asia Maggiore. Viaggio nella Cina e altri scritti (Rome: Manifestolibri, 2007), p. 28.11 Fortini, Asia Maggiore, p. 28.12 Edoarda Masi, ‘Postfazione’, in Fortini, Asia Maggiore, pp. 259–268 (p. 262).13 See Theodore J. Cachey Jr., ‘An Italian Literary History of Travel’, Annali d’Italianistica, vol. 14 (1996), 55–64 [accessed 4 June 2023], and Loredana Polezzi, Translating Travel: Contemporary Italian Travel Writing in English Translation (London: Routledge, 2001).14 For an overview of the Chinese travel accounts of Italian writers from the fifties to 1980, see again Cocurullo, La cortina di bambù, and Gaia De Pascale, Scrittori in viaggio. Narratori e poeti italiani del Novecento in giro per il mondo (Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 2001), pp. 157–185. For a broader picture of the interest of Western intellectuals in socialist countries, see Paul Hollander, Political Pilgrims. Western Intellectuals in Search of the Good Society (London: Routledge, 1981).15 I refer a few times to the concepts of the radical alterity and of the irreducible difference represented by the Chinese Other in relation to Western travellers and writers. The topic of the definition of a Western identity in relation and in opposition to the non-Western world and the consequent idea of the Eastern world as the embodiment of a radical Other is too vast to be treated here, but it must at least concern Said’s notion of orientalism (Edward W. Said, Orientalism, New York: Pantheon Books, 1978) and the related idea of the Western imperialist construction of a stereotypical representation of Eastern cultures.16 Fortini, Asia Maggiore, p. 30.17 This is also highlighted in the introductory essay by Donatello Santarone to the 2007 edition of Asia Maggiore: ‘“Contraddizioni e identità fra noi”: Fortini e la Cina’, in Fortini, Asia Maggiore, pp. 7–21 (p. 18). The issue of the allegorical value of revolutionary China to Fortini is further discussed in Yang Lin, ‘L’immagine della Cina di Franco Fortini: intellettuale e viaggiatore “allegorista”’, InVerbis, 1/2022, 159–172. In particular, the author underlines the importance to Fortini of Maoist China as a virtuous example of socialist revolution and the allegorical intention of the journey itself.18 See Roland Barthes, Image, Music, Text, trans. and ed. By Stephen Heath (London: Fontana Press, 1977), pp. 15–31.19 Ludovica Del Castillo cites as a quintessential example of the deceitfulness of photography the famous case of the fake cormorant photo from the Gulf War (Ludovica Del Castillo, ‘Il reportage come fotografia in scrittura: la Cina di Roland Barthes, Franco Fortini e Goffredo Parise’, Between Journal, VIII.16 (2018) (p. 3). A full discussion is beyond the scope of this article, yet it is necessary to mention the reflections made by Bertolt Brecht – a central name in Fortini’s theoretical constellation – on the deceitfulness of photography as seen in Kriegsfibel (War Primer), published for the first time in 1955, one year earlier than Asia Maggiore. Linked to the compositional strategy of War Primer is the idea of the photo-text as a privileged canvas on which the twentieth century’s historical tragedies can be displayed (Michele Cometa, ‘Fototesti. Per una tipologia dell’iconotesto in letteratura’, in La fotografia. Oggetto teorico e pratica sociale. Atti del XXXVIII Congresso AISS, eds. V. Del Marco, I. Pezzini (Rome: Edizioni Nuova Cultura, 2011), pp. 63–101 (p. 67).20 Fortini, Asia Maggiore, p. 25.21 Fortini, Asia Maggiore, p. 133. The mentioned essay by Italo Calvino is ‘La follia del mirino’, first published in Il Contemporaneo, 30 April 1955 and now collected in Italo Calvino, Saggi 1945–1985, tomo II, ed. M. Barenghi (Milan: Mondadori, 2001), pp. 2217–19.22 Fortini, Asia Maggiore, p. 133.23 Fortini, Asia Maggiore, p. 225.24 The partiality and the unreliability of the official media and information sources of Mao’s China are discussed by Edoarda Masi in relation to the 1966 Cultural Revolution: Edoarda Masi, La contestazione cinese (Turin: Einaudi, 1969 [1968]), pp. 138–141.25 Fortini, Asia Maggiore, p. 122.26 The back cover portrait of Fortini in China, as mentioned, is only present in the 1956 edition.27 The simultaneous use of text and photographs had been well established in twentieth-century reports on China by professional journalists, from the works of Luigi Barzini, Mario Appelius, and Arnaldo Cipolla in the first half of the century to Corrado Pizzinelli’s Dietro la grande muraglia (Milan: Mondadori, 1956).28 The tension between documentary and narrative aspects of the travel account is discussed in Sergio Bozzola, Retorica e narrazione del viaggio. Diari, relazioni, itinerari fra Quattro e Cinquecento (Rome: Salerno Editrice, 2020), pp. 72–109. On the hybridity of the travel writing genre and its links with the self, see also Casey Blanton, Travel Writing: The Self and the World (London: Routledge, 2002) and Peter Hulme and Tim Youngs (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).29 Giuseppe Carrara, Storie a vista. Retorica e poetiche del fototesto, (Milan: Mimesis, 2020), pp. 194–210 (p. 194).30 Fortini, Asia Maggiore, pp. 28–29.31 Giuliana Benvenuti, ‘Il diarismo in «Asia Maggiore» di Fortini’, in Anna Dolfi, Nicola Curi, Rodolfo Sacchettini (eds.), Memorie, autobiografie e diari nella letteratura italiana dell’Ottocento e del Novecento (Pisa: ETS, 2008), pp. 497–505 (p. 498).32 Antonio Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere. Volume terzo. Quaderni 12–29 (Turin: Einaudi, 1977), Quaderno 14 (1), p. 1718.33 The idea of a possible unifying language can be connected to Benjamin’s concept of a pure language emerging from the end of individual languages, which is intrinsic to the issue of translation. For Benjamin’s philosophy of language and his discussion on the nature of translation, see ‘Il compito del traduttore’ in Walter Benjamin, Angelus Novus. Saggi e frammenti, trans. by Renato Solmi (Turin: Einaudi, 1962), pp. 39–52 and Cesare Cases, ‘Walter Benjamin teorico della traduzione’, in Walter Benjamin. Testi e commenti – L’Ospite Ingrato ns 3 (Macerata: Quodlibet, 2013), pp. 233–237. Besides Benjamin’s philosophy of language, Fortini’s theoretical reflections on translation can be inserted into a framework that includes at least the notion of traducibilità in Gramsci (Gramsci, Quaderni, Quaderno 11, par. 46–49).34 Fortini, Asia Maggiore, p. 139.35 Fortini, Asia Maggiore, p. 231.36 Fortini, Asia Maggiore (1956), pp. 64–65.37 Fortini, Asia Maggiore (1956), pp. 64–65.38 Michele Cometa, ‘Forme e retoriche del fototesto letterario’, in Fototesti. Letteratura e cultura visuale, ed. by Michele Cometa and Roberta Coglitore (Macerata: Quodlibet, 2016), pp. 69–115 (p. 89).39 Bozzola, p. 83. The choice of the semantic sphere of colours as the subject of the analysis has been compiled through a first selection of recurring subjects based on a quantitative analysis of their occurrences in the text. I counted a total of 266 chromatic adjectives or specifications throughout the book.40 Carrara, pp. 194–210.41 Fortini, Asia Maggiore, pp. 85, 72, 198, 230, 225.42 Ibid., p. 226.43 Ibid., p. 101.44 Ibid., p. 66.45 Ibid., pp. 87, 109.46 Fortini, Asia Maggiore, p. 45. Italics in the source.47 Bozzola, p. 56.48 See Fortini, Asia Maggiore, pp. 44, 47, 84, 88 and the caption to photograph 6 of the 1956 edition.49 Fortini, Asia Maggiore, pp. 44, 64, 65, 109, 229, 227, 44, 198, 112.50 See Fortini, Asia Maggiore, p. 226. Citations: Fortini, Asia Maggiore, pp. 102, 70.51 As with colours, the choice of the topic of crowd has been made based on its frequency in the book. I have counted 112 occurrences of expressions including the word folla or massa or referring in figurative ways to the idea of the crowd.52 Yang Lin also mentions the prominent role of the Chinese crowds in Fortini’s descriptions (Yang Lin, ‘L’immagine della Cina’, pp. 163–164). The author briefly refers to the importance of the crowd, especially in Beijing, when discussing the differences that Fortini saw between an ‘old’ China and the ‘new’ and young revolutionary one.53 Benjamin, pp. 89–130.54 Ibid., p. 99.55 Fortini, Asia Maggiore, pp. 225, 190, 185.56 Fortini, Asia Maggiore, pp. 229, 61.57 Ibid., pp. 221, 191.58 Fortini, Asia Maggiore, pp. 44, 127, 152, 224, 133.59 Ibid., p. 185. The image of hands as synecdoches for the bodies of those forgotten or eradicated in history reappear in Fortini’s 1963 essay ‘Le mani di Radek’, in Franco Fortini, Verifica dei poteri. Scritti di critica e di istituzioni letterarie (Milan: Il Saggiatore, 2017), pp. 109–119.60 Fortini, Asia Maggiore, p. 44.61 Romano Luperini, L’allegoria del moderno (Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1990), p. 89.62 Fortini, Asia Maggiore, pp. 121–122.63 Ibid., p. 229.64 Fortini, Asia Maggiore, pp. 121–122.65 Citation: Fortini, Asia Maggiore, p. 44.66 Fortini, Asia Maggiore, p. 43.67 Fortini, Asia Maggiore, pp. 55, 133, 77.68 Fortini, Asia Maggiore, p. 137.69 A short but relevant discussion of some of the misinterpretations of the Chinese experience by Western socialist intellectuals can be found in Edoarda Masi’s essay ‘Interpretazioni della politica cinese’, in Masi, La contestazione cinese, pp. 52–57.70 Franco Fortini, Questioni di frontiera. Scritti di politica e di letteratura 1965–1977 (Turin: Einaudi, 1977), p. 192.71 Luperini, L’allegoria del moderno, pp. 46–50. For an overview on the origins of the debate involving Goethe, Schelling, and Romanticism, see Tzvetan Todorov, Teorie del simbolo, trans. by E. Klersy Imberciadori (Milan: Garzanti, 2008), pp. 254–277.72 György Lukács, ‘Allegoria e simbolo’, Belfagor, 24:2, 1969 (Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 1969), 125–66 (pp. 126 onwards).73 Luperini, L’allegoria, p. 46.74 Fortini, Asia Maggiore, p. 34.75 Luperini, L’allegoria, pp. 62, 29, 26.76 Fortini, Asia Maggiore, p. 66.77 Bozzola, p. 25.78 Eric Leed, The Mind of the Traveller: From Gilgamesh to Global Tourism (New York: Basic Books, 1991), pp. 67–69.79 Franco Fortini, ‘Le chinois, ça s’apprend’, in L’ospite ingrato primo e secondo (Turin: Marietti, 1985), pp. 90–91 (p. 90).80 Fortini, Verifica dei poteri, p. 116.81 Fortini, Asia Maggiore, pp. 149, 110, 111.82 Ibid., p. 224.83 See Chaïm Perelman, Il dominio retorico (Turin: Einaudi, 1977), pp. 125 and following, and Bice Mortara Garavelli, Manuale di retorica (Milan: Bompiani, 1988), pp. 100–102.84 Fortini, Asia Maggiore, p. 124.85 Fortini, Asia Maggiore, p. 96.86 Fortini, Asia Maggiore, p. 132.87 Fortini, Asia Maggiore, p. 44.88 Cometa, ‘Fototesti’, p. 71.