The Journal of Decorative and Propaganda Arts - UCLA Department ...

n DAPAVinter 1987
connected to the ruin of his monumental literary project: he intended to "restore"
them both with his invasion of Fiume. The Canti della Guerra Latina (Songs of
the LotintVar),which celebrate the tragic battles fought on the Carso and on
the Carnaro, close with a text dated November 3-11, 1918 (published in1l
Coffiere dell.a Sera)which calls for the liberation of Istria and Dalmatia, both
of which were still in "foreign" hands as a result of the peace treaties of 1918.
Occupied by allied forces, the city of Fiume found itself in an extremely ambiguous
position after the waq since the large majority of the inhabitants were in
favor of is annexation by Italy D'Annunzio, the decorated hero of \forld\Var I,
was invited to take command of the situation in Fiume by the factions in favor
of annexation. On September 72,1919, D'Annunzio marched on Fiume with a
group of "legionnaires," mostly veterans disgruntled by the "mutilated victory;'
and occupied it until the so-called "Bloody Christmas" of 1920,when the Italian
nary shelled the ciry After several days of fighting in which a number of legionnaires
were killed and the "Commander" himself was slightlywounded,
D'Annunzio's expeditionary force was compelled by the ltalian forces to
withdraw from the city
\X,hen D'Annunzio himself "retired" to the villa at Cargnacco in February
1927,there were only rwenty months left to go before the Fascist
"March on
Rome." D'Annunzio, despite the humiliation he had suffered at Fiume, was a living
legend, a controversial figure who incarnated the political, ideological, esthetic,
and erotic aspirations of a good part of the Italian population at the
threshold of the Fascist era. His retirement to I1 Vittoriale marked the end of
anera, and can be seen as a symbolic moment in the history of the Italian imagination.
It is the moment in which the most utopian and (also) delirious ideals
of Italian nationalism, as well as the Romantic esthetic and political idedls that
had been present in Italy since the Risorgimento, all become the tools of a new
political pragmatism. D'Annunzio exited from the stage of public life, along
with his literary dreams, but the m)'ths to whose creation he had contributed
with his works and with his life continued to play a fundamental role in the
Italian politic al arena. Ironically it was the "great demagogue" himself who exploited
the traces left by D Annunzio's mlths in the collective Italian mind, in
order to gain a consensus for the "New Statutes" of the Fascist regime. The
mlth of the "hero," who is both the conscience and the maker of a new society
founded on the recovery of the great Italian tradition; the myh of the beautiful
and victorious body of Italy; the mlth of work and labor as artistic endeavors
that liberate mankind; the myh of the religious meaning of war and heroic sacrifice
in the name of a "greater Italy": all these were myths that Fascism recaptured
and carefully cultivated for its own uses. Mussolini himself appeared as
the incarnation of the superhuman hero that D'Annunzio had prophesized.
Fascist rhetoric appropriated the methods that D'Annunziohad developed for
mass communication and for mass persuasion, and often employed expressions,
slogans, sayings, syntactical structures, and rhetorical figures from
D'Annunzio's political poetry and oratory. Mussolini's new pragmatism, though,
made D'Annunzio into an obsolete figure. And thus the poet closed himself
into his "theater of memory" in which he gathered together the images and the
tokens of his life and work, and in which-directly or indirectly-the fundamental
themes of ltalian culture bemveen the end of the nineteenth century
and the beginning of the Fascist eraare reflected. In this theateq D'Annunzio
continued to play his many roles, and to wear his many masks, to live, to love,
and to write. But he became aware that even though all the world was a stage,
he had been forever displaced from the center of the Italian stage. All of Italy
continued, nevertheless, to give its attention to the "stage" of Il Vittoriale, not