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DAPAVinter 1987 thetic invention. D'Annunzio's writing, in its travels from classical Greece to the works of the nineteenth-cenrury Italian poet Giosud carducci, persistently explores all the author's own "sacred" sites (especially Michelangelo's Sistine chapel) in order to develop an absolute superhuman synthesis that is a prelude to or-as in the paronomasric game that D'Annunzio often played with his thatannounces the onset of a modern epic. The war in Lib_va seemed all of a sudden to make the image of heroic navigation less speculative and literary in nature, providing authentic heroes and fighters who were, in D Annunzio's opinion, the protagonists of truly epic events. In realry of course, this was for D Annunzio the prelude not to an epic, but rather ro a tragedythat of the First \forld War. The absurd and grandiose image of the warship Ptr8lia on the grounds of Il vittoriale, which was donared ro D'Annunzio by the Italian nar,y and placed in L925 on a promontory overlooking the lake, surrounded by a rypress grove, and with a bronze Vinged Victoty (awar memorial by the sculptor Renaro Brozzi) decorating its proq bears pathetic and eloquent witness to D Annunzio's personal myths of navigation and victory (fig. 9) D'Annunzio sent his propagandistic poems to Italy from France, where he had been "in exile" since March 1910. For D'Annunzio was "never out of love or our of debt" during the years that he had spent ar senignano (near Florence) in the villa called La capponcina, first with Eleonora Duse and later with a series of Iovers, leading a sumpruous life as a kind of "Renaissance prince." And finally, in order to escape from his creditors, he was obliged to auction off all his belongings and then literally to flee abroad ro France. And the signs of yet another personal metamorphosis appear with the publication in 1910 of his allegorical novel Forse cbe siforse cbe no (Maybe yes, Maybe No). In it D'Annunzio celebrates the heroism of another kind of "mad flight," that of the firsr aviarors (D Annunzio had flown for the first time at Montichiari in 1909, durins the first international airplane rally ). Two differenr interpretarions of flight can be found in.Rrrse cbe siforse cbe no. The first is the epic celebration of flight as a metaphor of superhuman heroism and the will to power. The second, instead, discovers in it an anguished aftempt to escape from the labyrinth of exrstence, in which individual choices-whether emotional or intellectual ones-reveal themselves as inevitably false and illusory since the only rs21it beyond the plav of appearances and of rhetorical and eroric seduction, with which man convinces himself that he is "free," is illness, the decay of the body, and death. \Tithfirrse cbe siforse cbe no the "exploration of shadow" and the "nocturnal" register begin to emerge in D'Annunzio's prose. In the occasional prose pieces and autobiographical fragments called "Faville del Maglio" ("Sparks of the Mallet") which D Annunzio published in Il corriere della sera, and in longer texts likeza contemplazione dellamone (Tbe contemplationof Death),he presented to the public a self-image which differed dramatically from that of the orator and political poet. In his nocturnal prose, in fact, we can see the breakdown of the full and Romantic harmony of discourse; in its fragmentary and allusive texture, and in the dark and restless rhlthm of its language, which takes on a meditative, erratic, and nostalgic tone, this mode of writing is reminiscent of the "decadent" music of Liszt's lastworks (and D'Annunzio always loved Liszt's music). This atmosphere is suggestively recreared "Music for us in the the Room" in the Priory (fig. 10). The contradictory image of himself that D'Annunzio continued to proffer continued to be a scandal, earning him applause and censure. Hugo von Hofmannsthal defined him as "a casanova dressed up as a warrior." Italian literary critics ignored or condemned outright his oratorical and political poetry but greeted favorably his precious "nocturnal" prose, which soon became a
Page 1 and 2: Winter 1987 Italian Theme Issue The
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Page 14 and 15: La relazione con la grande attrice
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Page 22 and 23: Corriere della Sera, e in testi pii
Page 24 and 25: Essa corrisponde piutrosto al tenta
Page 26 and 27: la fine di un'epoca e pud essere vi
Page 28 and 29: individuale di D'Annunzio esula inf
Page 30 and 31: oggetti che D'Annunzio integra nell
Page 32 and 33: venne mai approvato da D'Annunzio,
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