Utopia in Late Modernity: Literary Critiques of the ‘Neapolitan Renaissance’

Abstract

Naples does not readily spring to mind as a model city or urban utopia. Though widely celebrated in the literature of classical antiquity, reactions to Naples have been remarkably polarized since at least the time of the Renaissance, when the city produced the canonical text of Italian utopianism, Tommaso Campanella’s La città del sole [The City of the Sun] (1602). The long tradition of appreciation for the natural setting and built environment of Naples, which enjoyed a ‘golden age’ in the eighteenth century and was designated as ‘one of the most beautiful cities in the world’, is offset by an almost equally long tradition of vilification of the Neapolitan populace, in the form of its plebeian masses.¹ That distinction between Naples and its people – encapsulated in the historic renown of the city as ‘un paradiso abitato da diavoli’ [a paradise inhabited by devils] – persists to some extent into the present day.² However, the advent of Italian Unification in the late nineteenth century reshaped existing discourses about Naples to produce a more generalized ambivalence towards the city and its relationship with Italy.³ Since then, Naples has played a distinctive role in the Italian cultural imaginary, sometimes portrayed as the quintessence of Italian identity and the cradle of popular Italian culture, but rather more frequently depicted as the nation’s vilified Other, a ‘problem city’ and a thorn in the side of the modern nation-state.⁴ Though perennially oscillating between these two poles, it is the more negative extreme which tends to prevail in media reports and cultural representations that propel the city to international attention and that linger in the cultural imaginary. Most recently, the organized crime war of the early 2000s, the urban waste crisis of 2008 to 2010 and the extraordinary international success of Roberto Saviano’s Gomorra [Gomorrah] (2006) and its screen adaptations (2008; 2014–21) combined to characterize Naples as a deeply troubled city, mired in organized crime, social tensions and administrative dysfunction and offering scant opportunity for economic advancement or personal fulfilment.⁵ Rather than the ‘good place’, the best of all possible worlds, implicit in the term ‘utopia’, this is the stuff of dystopian nightmare.

It is ironic, then, that in the decade prior to the circulation of that dystopian view of Naples, the fortunes and reputation of the city were at an all-time high. The introduction of direct mayoral election in 1993, resulting in the two-term administration (1993–2000) of Antonio Bassolino, ushered in an astonishing period of urban renewal that came to be known as the ‘Neapolitan Renaissance’.⁶ The extraordinary success of the Bassolino administration in regenerating the city centre, reforming municipal governance, reinvigorating civil society and fostering urban citizenship built on existing grassroots initiatives and served to rehabilitate Naples’ reputation for disorder and dysfunction. Central to the administration’s success was a cultural politics focused on the regeneration of symbolic locations – historically or culturally significant ‘sites of identity’ – and the organization of a host of open-air cultural events designed to draw people back to neglected public spaces, rebrand Naples as a city of culture and, by attracting tourism and inward investment, lay the foundations for economic growth.⁷ In just a few years, a city that had been ‘a synonym for urban decay’ in the 1980s was now celebrated as a laboratory of urban regeneration and a hothouse of cultural creativity.⁸

Though much of the cultural production emerging from Naples in this period eschews the exuberance of media discourses relating to the city’s advancement, turning its attention away from the city centre to portray instead the sometimes mundane, sometimes insurmountable trials of alienated individuals struggling to get by at the margins of Neapolitan society,⁹ there exists a small body of work which responds to the cultural politics of the Bassolino administration. These include Italy’s first soap opera, Un posto al sole [A Place in the Sun], launched in 1996 and set in Naples but addressing a national audience, and the two literary works which are the focus of this article: Giuseppe Montesano’s Di questa vita menzognera [Of This Lying Life] (2003) and Ruggero Cappuccio’s Fuoco su Napoli [Fire over Naples] (2010).¹⁰ All three recognize and respond implicitly to the utopianism underpinning the Bassolino administration’s discursive and material regeneration of Naples. However, they do so in very different ways. Un posto al sole reproduces the mayoral utopianism by portraying the city and its people as a microcosm of Italian society not as it is but as the cultured, left-leaning audience of the Rai 3 TV network might want it to be.¹¹ In contrast, the two novels – published after the end of the Bassolino administration by authors based in the Neapolitan hinterland – deploy utopian plots in order to provide detailed critiques of the cultural and ‘symbolic politics’ of the ‘Neapolitan Renaissance’.¹² Lending credence to M. I. Finley’s critical maxim that utopian fantasies ‘grow out of the societies to which they are a response’, the novels provide critical commentary on the imbrication of the ‘Neapolitan Renaissance’ with Guy Debord’s theorization of the ‘society of the spectacle’, the criminalization of global capital and the populist politics of Berlusconi at the national level.¹³ In so doing, they raise a series of questions about the potential of utopian thinking in late modernity.

Urban utopics and the ‘Neapolitan Renaissance’

Critical understandings of the relationship between the city and utopia are poorly served by the derivation of the concept’s name from a literary work of the English Renaissance. The island setting and the intentional ambiguity between the ‘good place’ (eu-topia) and the imagined ‘no place’ (ou-topia) in the punning title of Thomas More’s Utopia (1516) diverge from the original context of utopian thinking and muddy the interpretative waters. Historical approaches to utopia provide an important corrective: they suggest that, far from imagined places, the great classical utopias derived their form from the Hellenic society out of which they emerged and reflected historical realities. Seeking to account for the persistence of social ills such as compulsion and regimentation in every utopian vision, Lewis Mumford ventures that, rather than a speculative fantasy, Hellenic utopias were ‘the belated reflections, or ideological residues, of […] the archetypal ancient city’.¹⁴ The intrinsic connection with the urban at the point of origin (and beyond) is also stressed by literary critic Northrop Frye, who unequivocally declares that ‘the utopia is a city’. Indeed, for Frye, utopia is ‘primarily a vision of the orderly city and of a city-dominated society’, precisely because the city is the symbol of conscious design in and of society.¹⁵ Consequently, Frye views as ‘inevitable’ the revival of utopia as a literary genre in the Renaissance,¹⁶ a period characterized by the breakdown of medieval social order, ‘the “decline of the communal government and the concentration of power in the hands of seigneurial families” keen to enhance their status by serving as patrons of ambitious architects and city planners and as promulgators of civic pride’.¹⁷

If, as for Antonis Balasopoulos, the duality between the good and the imagined place in the term ‘utopia’ is the ‘mark of a productive and generative tension between decaying and emerging social relations’ of the Renaissance,¹⁸ it has also given rise to the conventional, pejorative understanding of utopia as ‘an impossible dream – an escapist fantasy, at best a pleasant but pointless entertainment’, at worst ‘escapist, unrealistic and even authoritarian’.¹⁹ That conventional understanding, widespread in the scholarly literature, is countered by critical understandings that build on Ernst Bloch’s move to distinguish between different registers of the utopian imagination.²⁰ Caroline Edwards, for instance, differentiates ‘between abstract dreams that express utopian longing and their concrete embodiment within objectively possible social goals or movements’.²¹ Operating at a deeper structural level is Ruth Levitas’s distinction between conceptualizations of utopia as product – ‘fully-fledged utopias in the form of imagined societies’ – and utopia as process, one pertaining to the ‘imaginary reconstitution of society’.²² Central to the latter is the reconceptualization of utopia as ‘the education of desire’ and ‘the expression of desire for a better way of living’.²³

Levitas’s distinction is key to my understanding of the ‘Neapolitan Renaissance’ and its representation in cultural production. In accordance with Levitas’s articulation of utopia as product, I argue that although the positive effects of the ‘Neapolitan Renaissance’ would not endure, nonetheless under the Bassolino administration Naples represented something akin to a utopian ideal – albeit one best understood in terms of the ‘minor’ utopian ‘moment of possibility’ conceptualized by the historian Jay Winter.²⁴ In the wake of the devastating Tangentopoli scandal at the national level,²⁵ Naples emerged as the ‘città-simbolo’ [symbolic city] of Italy’s new framework for urban governance and was widely hailed as a beacon of enlightened administration, demonstrating what inclusive politics, strategic regeneration and the fostering of urban citizenship might achieve under even the most challenging of circumstances.²⁶ Second, and in accordance with Levitas’s understanding of utopia as process, I contend that despite the care taken by the Bassolino administration to manage expectations and discourage some of the more extravagant assessments of the city’s transformation, a utopian impulse may be seen to animate the work of the administration.²⁷ This is best exemplified by its ambition not only to reclaim the city and regenerate the urban space but also to reform its citizens – to ‘forgiare l’Uomo Nuovo, il napoletano che rispetta le regole e il codice di strada’ [forge the New Man, the Neapolitan who respects the rules and the highway code], in the words of journalist Marco Demarco.²⁸ Such an ambition resonates with Levitas’s insistence on the ‘education of desire’ and the ‘expression of desire for a better way of living’ at the heart of the utopian ‘imaginary reconstitution of society’.²⁹

Despite the centrality of utopian thinking to urban planning, theory and governance, the utopianism of the Bassolino administration’s approach to Naples is not generally acknowledged in scholarship or in debates addressing the ‘Neapolitan Renaissance’. That it surfaces only in the small corpus of literary works that engage obliquely with that experience by addressing the cultural politics upon which it is premised is testament not only to the strength of the bond between literature and utopia but also to contemporary literature’s concern with the urban as a privileged forum for analysis of the human condition in late modernity. I approach these texts with Gregory Claeys and Lyman Tower Sargent’s understanding of utopia in mind – an understanding which is not coextensive with ‘eu-topia’ but which interprets both ‘good and bad’ imagined worlds as variants of utopian thinking.³⁰ In their different ways, Di questa vita menzognera and Fuoco su Napoli speak to the value of utopian thinking as a way of reimagining the city anew in ‘our new urban century’ while also alerting us to the risks and dangers inherent in the utopian enterprise, in Naples or elsewhere.³¹

Utopia as pastiche in the society of the spectacle: ‘Di questa vita menzognera’

Giuseppe Montesano’s Di questa vita menzognera (2003) was published just two years after the end of Bassolino’s second term and in the midst of growing criticisms of the administration’s particular brand of ‘symbolic politics’. Accusations that Bassolino’s emphasis on ‘sites of identity’ in the historic centre came at the expense of tackling social problems at the outskirts of the city, coupled with evidence of an escalation in organized crime, lent credence to Roberto Esposito’s declaration in 1999 of the demise of the ‘Neapolitan Renaissance’.³² Rather than a comprehensive condemnation of the cultural politics of the Bassolino administration, I would suggest that Montesano’s novel provides ironic commentary on the anxieties surrounding Naples at the turn of the century but it has just as much to say about developments at the national level – the return to power of media mogul Silvio Berlusconi in 2001 – as it does about the ‘Neapolitan Renaissance’ and its failure to tackle the rise of a new form of criminality. Of heightened relevance here is the way in which the novel connects the cultural turn of the ‘Neapolitan Renaissance’ to Guy Debord’s theorization of the society of the spectacle, presenting the former as the banal realization of the latter and issuing a stark warning about its susceptibility to criminal exploitation and oppression.

Narrated by an outsider, Roberto, the plot of Di questa vita menzognera revolves around the undisputed criminal overlords of Naples, the fantastically rich and intensely vulgar Negromonte family.³³ Their eighteenth-century villa is host to a carnivalesque world-upside-down of petty rivalries, moral bankruptcy and extravagantly debauched feasts reminiscent of the Satyricon, a work explicitly and repeatedly recalled in the text. Reflecting the cultural turn of the Bassolino administration but pushing the associated concept of the commodification of culture to its extreme, the Negromonte brothers devise an ingenious plan to transform the entire city into a theme park, the name of which – Eternapoli – evokes the utopian life after death envisaged for a city that must first undergo a simulated apocalyptic event designed to facilitate the eradication of opposition.³⁴ As outlined by the eldest brother, who suffers from ‘l’illusione ottusa del dominio’ (D, 29) [the dim-witted illusion of domination] and is known by the Shakespearean moniker ‘Il Calebbano’, the Negromontes intend to commodify Naples and its people, repackaging and selling them in accordance with the logic of the cultural economy:

si sarebbero venduti Napoli con il golfo, il Vesuvio e gli abitanti. Si vendevano tutto il Sud, ma con la gente dentro, come in un immenso parco tematico. L’idea […] era di far diventare Napoli ‘la grande capitale’ della nuova economia […] la California della cultura. (D, 38)

[they would sell Naples, along with the bay, Vesuvius, and its [Naples’] inhabitants. They were selling the entire South, with the people inside, as an immense theme park. The idea […] was to make Naples ‘the great capital’ of the new economy […] the California of culture.]

Reflecting the Bassolino administration’s recognition of Naples’ history and cultural heritage as an unexploited resource, the Negromontes emphasize the commercial potential of the city’s past and place it at the centre of their grandiose ambitions to exploit the ‘economia immateriale’ (D, 38) [immaterial economy]. Specifying that ‘la vera ricchezza della città era il suo passato’ (D, 80) [the real wealth of the city was its past], their plan is not only to excavate and bring to light the underground ancient Greek city of Neapolis, alongside the overground Naples of the Angevins and Spanish, but to reconstruct, stone by stone, all that previously existed of the city’s layered past. The rhetorical excess and ironic tone accompanying the account of the family’s determination to rebuild the city ‘uguale a quella antica, anzi più antica di prima’ (D, 79) [identical to the old one, in fact even older than before] exposes the purely instrumental approach to the historical authenticity they claim to prize and characterizes both the narrative itself and the utopian dream it recounts as pastiche. If, as for Fredric Jameson, pastiche – understood as the replacement of historical depth with the surface appearance of the same, or the imitation of a ‘historically original modern thing’ – is an operation intrinsic to postmodernism, the postmodernist flavour of the novel is further emphasized by the ludic quality of the narration and the ironic tone that accompanies its discussion of utopia.³⁵

Equally emblematic of postmodernism is the figure of the theme park that pervades the novel’s envisaged reconstruction of Naples as the ideal, imagined society of Eternapoli. Critical interpretations of the theme park and its place in contemporary urban design shed light on the possible motivations and implications of that vision. On the one hand, the theme park is understood to be emblematic of late capitalism in so far as it reflects the increasingly central role played by privately owned, regulated and controlled spaces of consumption and their encroachment into the heritage, museum and culture sectors, now conceived of in terms of ‘industry’ or ‘economy’. Thus, for John Urry and Jonas Larsen, themed spaces are ‘typified by high capital investment, private ownership, international “brands” and surveillance’.³⁶ Equally significant, however, is the understanding that ‘theming revolves around the tourist gaze. Themed environments stimulate primarily the visual sense through spectacular but also predictable and well-known signs’.³⁷ In other words, the theme park subordinates a sense of place to a semiotics of tourism and reduces the layered complexity of historical, social and political realities to a surface-level play of impressions.³⁸ It thus represents for Jean Baudrillard the ‘perfect model for the entangled orders of simulacra’; for Umberto Eco ‘an allegory of consumer society, a place of absolute iconism’; and for Louis Marin a ‘degenerate utopia’ – an exemplification of ideology transformed into myth.³⁹

The historical orientation of Eternapoli invites consideration of scholarship addressing the prominence of the past in contemporary urbanism’s reimagining of ‘the city as theme park’.⁴⁰ M. Christine Boyer argues that the proliferation of new urban sites laden with historical allusions functions as theatre designed to stimulate consumption. However, Boyer claims, ‘the reiteration and recycling of symbolic codes to the point of cliché’ and the stockpiling of ‘the city’s past with all available artefacts and relics’ serve merely to obscure the city’s actual history and to ensure that ‘the city’s image becomes the spectacle itself’.⁴¹ Michael Sorkin instead focuses on the political implications of theming in the urban context. He observes that, in replacing the ‘intimate, undisciplined differentiation of traditional cities’ with a ‘universal particular, a generic urbanism’ that draws its authority ‘from a spuriously appropriated past’, the theme park strips urbanity of its sting (the presence of the poor, crime, dirt, work) and ‘presents its happily regulated vision of pleasure […] as a substitute for the democratic public realm’.⁴²

As will be shown, the utopian fantasy of Eternapoli in Di questa vita menzognera encompasses aspects of these diverse theorizations of the theme park and plays on the dual meanings of the Italian ‘società’ – ‘society’ and ‘company’, in a commercial sense. The fantasy of Eternapoli addresses the entanglement of the hyperreal, consumer society and ideology at the end of the second millennium, as exemplified by both the left-leaning symbolic politics of the Bassolino administration in Naples and the right-leaning Berlusconismo at the national level. However, Eternapoli speaks most directly to a correlation between the ‘Neapolitan Renaissance’ and Debord’s theorization of ‘the society of the spectacle’. Initially presented as a kind of ‘open-air museum’, Eternapoli is in fact construed as a ‘teatro perpetuo’ (D, 166) [perpetual theatre], offering an immersive experience for visitors. In a superlative manifestation of postmodern montage and simulation, and exemplifying Debord’s contention that ‘as culture becomes completely commodified, it tends to become the star commodity of the spectacular society’,⁴³ significant episodes in the city’s tumultuous history – revolutions, earthquakes, instances of destruction and reconstruction – will be recreated on anniversaries for the consumption and pleasure of the tourists to whom the city will exclusively cater. Ultimately, we are told, the aim of Eternapoli is to ‘vendere l’esperienza reale di mondi che non esistevano più. La gente non doveva soggiornare all’Hotel Neapolis, ma vivere a Neapolis’ (D, 82) [sell the real experience of worlds that no longer existed. Visitors were not just to stay at the Hotel Neapolis but to live in Neapolis].

The capacity of the Negromontes to realize the ‘degenerate utopia’ of Eternapoli is dependent upon a reconfiguration of the political order that recalls Sorkin’s caution about the political dangers of the city as theme park.⁴⁴ The reconfiguration involves in the first instance the eradication of the very concept of the public, as the closure of the city’s museums and galleries and the expropriation and privatization of all exhibits and artworks is required to finance the construction of Eternapoli. Furthermore, recognizing that the success of the venture rests on their ability to govern, the Negromonte family work to secure the complicity of the national government, represented by the figure of the Presidente, a thinly veiled reference to Silvio Berlusconi. In a clear allusion to the moral bankruptcy of the nation-state and the subservience of political power to economic power in the age of late capitalism, the younger Negromonte brother, Lo Sciacallo [The Jackal], sets out the political programme for the realization of the ‘new kingdom’ of Eternapoli:

Il potere centrale, l’esercito e le televisioni nazionali restavano nelle mani del Presidente, il governo dava il Sud in concessione ai Negromonte e agli altri imprenditori e in cambio riceveva la massima fedeltà. Era una forma di outsorcing, no? Quello che prima l’azienda faceva da sola, ora lo lasciava fare a altri. Non era quello, il progetto del Presidente? L’Italia in outsorcing avrebbe realizzato il passaggio definitivo a una società in cui chi produceva la ricchezza si assumeva anche il peso di governare.⁴⁵ (D, 82–83)

[Centralized power, the army and the national television stations would remain in the hands of the President, the government would give the South in concession to the Negromontes and the other entrepreneurs and, in exchange, would receive the utmost loyalty. It was a form of outsourcing, right? What the company used to do itself, now it would leave to others. Wasn’t that the President’s plan? Outsourcing Italy would achieve the ultimate transition to a society in which those who produced the wealth would also assume the burden of governing.]

If, on the one hand, these words speak to Berlusconi’s insistence on his financial and managerial capacities as evidence of his fitness to govern Italy – and the consequent construction of the nation as a business – they also evoke the historical relationship between South and North in post-Unification Italy. The outsourcing of the Italian South to the criminal caste of the Negromontes and their allies recalls the effective devolution of law and order to a caste of foremen running the large estates of the South on behalf of a class of absentee landowners or political authorities and seen as the forerunners of the modern mafia.⁴⁶ That the arrangement envisaged by the Negromontes is, as their intellectual brother-in-law Cardano realizes, nothing less than a return to feudalism is a proposition that the brothers willingly concede. Their assertion that the people are weary of democracy and prefer not to be troubled by politics (D, 51) finds apparent confirmation in the enthusiastic response of Neapolitans to the prospect of being called upon – in ironic reiteration of stereotypes of Neapolitan performativity and dissimulation – to serve in the new utopia, ‘a recitare se stessi in un museo perpetuo’ (D, 81) [to play themselves in a perpetual museum]:

Una frenesia si era impadronita della città e sulle soglie delle case si parlava solo di teatro, di soldi, di terziario.

‘’O turismo totale! […] È nu grand’omme, ’stu Negromonte…’.

‘Non dobbiamo fare niente. Ieri ha detto alla televisione: “Volete vivere la vostra vita? Bene! Quello sarà il vostro lavoro”…’.

‘È nu grand’omme! “Niente più lavoro subalterno, basta con lo stipendio, ora siete tutti padroni”. ’E capito? Simmo tutte padrune!’ (D, 126)

[A frenzy had taken hold of the city and on the doorsteps all the talk was of theatre, money, the service sector.

‘Total tourism! […] He’s a great man, that Negromonte…’.

‘We don’t have to do anything. Yesterday on television he said: “You want to live your lives? Fine! That will be your work”…’.

‘He’s a great man! “No more menial work, an end to wages, now you are all in charge”. Did you get that? We’re all in charge!’]

The cheap slogans readily imbibed and reiterated by the city’s inhabitants in the local dialect – ‘la nostra vita adda diventà nu tiatro!’ [our life must become theatre]; ‘La casa sarà la bottega, e la bottega sarà la casa!’ [the home will be the workshop and the workshop will be the home] (D, 128) – lend weight to Debord’s intuition that ‘the spectacle keeps people in a state of unconsciousness’.⁴⁷ They are also a counterpoint to the Negromontes’ own strategy in constructing their vision for Naples and selling it to both the government and the people. Central to their success is the apparent acquisition of the cultural capital necessary to establish their credentials and mobilize financial and political capital in support of their project.⁴⁸ It is to this end that they enlist the help of the narrator-protagonist Roberto and the intellectual Cardano, employing them to provide excerpts from a wide-ranging corpus of religious, philosophical and literary texts to shore up their enterprise. The most commonly cited include Franz Kafka’s Amerika; Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx’s The Communist Manifesto; the Bible; Friedrich Nietzsche’s Twilight of the Idols; an unnamed volume by Confucius; Erasmus’s In Praise of Folly; Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle; the complete works of Oscar Wilde; the Book of Revelations. What might appear as a rather eclectic miscellany is far from an indiscriminate selection; the nominated texts reflect either the satirical style of Di questa vita menzognera, its primary concern with utopia, apocalypse and the society of the spectacle, or the aestheticism and decadence of the Negromontes and their vision for Naples.

The highly functional and cynical approach to the cultural repertoire exhibited by the Negromonte brothers, coupled with the accompanying reduction of that repertoire to soundbites and empty sloganeering, exposes the text’s concerns with the way in which culture may be instrumentalized for criminal gain and even authoritarian ends. Indeed, the objections raised by Roberto and Cardano, as they become increasingly alarmed by the scope and scale of the Negromontes’ plans, are immediately rebuffed by the brothers with phrases that Roberto and Cardano had excerpted from the cultural corpus. Countering idealized conceptions of culture as a bulwark against tyranny, every cultural maxim cited becomes yet another weapon in the Negromontes’ rhetorical arsenal, thereby exemplifying Debord’s claim that ‘the whole triumphant history of culture can be understood as a progressive revelation of the inadequacy of culture, as a march towards culture’s self-abolition’.⁴⁹

The narrative culminates with a vast city-wide Carnival, ostensibly the launch event for the permanent theatre of Eternapoli, but also an opportunity for the Negromontes to eliminate the opposition of the resistant few – represented by the underground organization CAOS – under the cover of staged revolutions and dramatic reconstructions of turbulent events in the city’s history.⁵⁰ In one location, the extravagant earthly paradise of the Cuccagna festival is recreated, while in another, now the site of a plastic Roman temple, the decapitation in 1647 of Masaniello, the leader of an anti-aristocratic insurrection, is re-enacted.⁵¹ If the contemporaneity of such spectacular reconstructions exemplifies the postmodernist flattening of history and the pastiche quality of Eternapoli, the events themselves serve to facilitate the rounding up of the Negromontes’ enemies on the part of their special guards, all dressed in the guise of Pulcinella, the quintessentially ambivalent Neapolitan character of the commedia dell’arte.⁵²

It is no coincidence, I would venture, that it is from the Piazza del Plebiscito – named for the political power of the people but now the recognized symbol of the ‘Neapolitan Renaissance’ and of Naples’ transformation into a city of art and culture – that the Negromontes mastermind the apocalyptic eruptions that unfold and broadcast to the wider city, via TV screens and loudspeakers, their vision for the new Naples.⁵³ Evoking the idea that the revolution will not only be televised but realized and communicated via televisual media, the event recalls Urry and Larsen’s identification of the analogies between Bentham’s panopticon prison and the visual and electronic surveillance found in themed spaces. Their observation that ‘a Foucaultian take on such spaces would stress that we are “neither in the amphitheatre, nor on the stage, but in the panopticon machine”’ finds its realization here, in Eternapoli.⁵⁴ At the same time, the use of televisual media as an instrument of control parallels Baudrillard’s analysis of the Gulf War; as in Baudrillard’s reading, so too in Di questa vita menzognera, media representations of the event as it occurs make it impossible to distinguish between what is truly happening and its stylized, selective misrepresentation through simulacra. Couched in cynically populist language, the broadcast effectively announces the end of democracy, liberty and paid employment but is rhetorically designed to pull the wool over the eyes of the masses through the deployment of phrases such as: ‘La forma di governo che meglio si adatta a un popolo di artisti è la totale assenza di governo’ (D, 174) [The form of government best suited to a population of artists is the total absence of government]; ‘Noi siamo il teatro che ha bisogno di tutti, ciascuno al suo posto’ (D, 175) [We are the theatre that needs everyone, each in their place]; ‘Noi siamo la vera rivoluzione di questo paese, noi siamo il sogno che diventa necessario’ (D, 178) [We are the true revolution of this country, we are the dream that becomes necessary].

While Di questa vita menzognera clearly addresses the symbolic and cultural politics of the Bassolino administration and provides implicit critique of the ‘Neapolitan Renaissance’, understood in the terms of utopia as product, i.e. as the construction of an ideal society, it is in fact Berlusconi at the national level rather than Bassolino in Naples who emerges as the real villain of the piece as the novel approaches its climax.⁵⁵ Looking ahead to the Carnival to come, a conversation between the brothers and the private tutor employed to elevate their cultural standing includes two direct quotations from The Society of the Spectacle and attributes to the Presidente the primary inspiration for the reconstruction of Naples as Eternapoli:

‘Precetto’, come dice il filosofo?’

‘Tutta la società si presenta come un’immensa accumulazione di spettacoli….’

‘Esatto, esatto! È stato il Presidente che ci ha aperto la mente. Si può dire tutto, perché il pensiero non conta niente, è giusto. Leggi, precetto’, leggi ancora’.

‘Tutto ciò che un tempo era vissuto direttamente si è allontanato in una rappresentazione…’.⁵⁶ (D, 166)

[‘Tutor, how does the philosopher put it?’

‘The whole society is presented as an immense accumulation of spectacles….’

‘Exactly, exactly! It was the President who opened our minds. You can say anything because thought counts for nothing, that’s right. Read, tutor, read some more.’

‘Everything that was directly lived has receded into a representation…’.]

Di questa vita menzognera thus speaks to anxieties in the cultural sphere surrounding the commodification of culture, not only in Naples but in Italy more generally, and the vulnerability of the cultural economy to exploitation on the part of an increasingly entrepreneurial criminal class, in the context of a national government intent on the detention of power through media dominance and populist slogans rather than through ideological conviction and political argument. While playfully riffing on Debord’s theorization, the novel also evokes more recent theoretical positions regarding how the increasing individualization of utopia, deemed to have become ‘thoroughly commercialized, marketized and a matter of private consumption’, testifies to the growing impotence of politics amid the ever more seductive appeal of flamboyant media images of the good life.⁵⁷ In equating the cultural politics of the ‘Neapolitan Renaissance’ with ‘the Society of the Spectacle’ and playfully exposing its vulnerability to exploitation by the Camorra, Di questa vita menzognera provides fair warning of the dangers that may lie ahead.

Utopianism adrift in retrotopia: ‘Fuoco su Napoli’

Ruggero Cappuccio’s Fuoco su Napoli builds on Di questa vita menzognera’s critique of the ‘Neapolitan Renaissance’ understood in terms of utopia as product – ‘the completed construction of an ideal, imagined society’ – but also explores the tyranny of the utopian impulse that animates utopia as a process pertaining to the ‘imaginary reconstruction of society’ and premised on ‘the expression of desire for a better way of living’.⁵⁸ The novel emerges in the aftermath of the city’s descent into dysfunction amid the violent Camorra feud of 2004 to 2006 and the domestic waste crisis of 2008 to 2010; it also follows the publication of Roberto Saviano’s hard-hitting exposé of the links between organized crime in the Naples area and global capital. Reflecting its later date, perhaps, Fuoco su Napoli engages far less overtly with the ‘Neapolitan Renaissance’ and is considerably darker in tone than Di questa vita menzognera; where Montesano’s world is constructed on playful postmodernist pastiche, Cappuccio’s is indebted to the extravagant plots, motifs and atmosphere of the nineteenth-century Italian cultural movement of decadentismo.⁵⁹ Pervaded by allusions to death or decline, alongside liberal use of symbolism to heighten the impending ‘sense of an ending’,⁶⁰Fuoco su Napoli presents a decidedly bleak assessment of both the utopian impulse and the cultural turn of the ‘Neapolitan Renaissance’, in the context of the expanding power of organized crime and the cynical politics of Berlusconismo at the national level.

The narrative centres on Diego Ventre – introduced to the reader as a lawyer but subsequently revealed to be the covert boss of an extremely powerful Camorra clan – and his vision for the post-apocalyptic reconstruction of Naples.⁶¹ Unlike the one-dimensional Negromonte family, Ventre is a complex character; a ruthless, entrepreneurial criminal working in consort with the Sicilian mafia, he exercises almost complete political and economic control over Naples. He is, at the same time, a highly cultured individual, who surrounds himself with tangible remnants of the city’s heritage – beautiful houses, precious objects, rare books and stolen works of art. In this respect, as Nicholas Albanese outlines, Ventre embodies the contradiction inherent in familiar depictions of Naples, being torn between profound appreciation for the city’s cultural history and ‘participation in the exploitative culture typical of the mafia and its financial reach’.⁶² His vision for the post-apocalyptic renewal of Naples is motivated by a utopian spirit and a genuine passion for the city’s artistic and architectural heritage, which is matched only by his love for the aristocratic Luce di Sangrano, an allegorical figure connoting luminosity of body and soul and, implicitly, the rarefied embodiment of Naples’ past splendour.

The novel opens with the apocalypse foretold: ‘Al massimo tra cinque mesi Napoli finirà di esistere’ (F, 9) [In five months at most, Naples will cease to exist]. A catastrophic eruption of the volcanic Phlegraean Fields, to the west of Naples, will combine with ensuing fire and flood to eradicate large swathes of the city. This knowledge is disclosed exclusively to Ventre, who imposes a thirty-day silence on his source and uses his advantage to buy and sell property in accordance with the vulcanological predictions and his ambitions for the city. The presentation of apocalyptic events as the handmaid to utopian renewal, the position of the Camorra at the centre of the action and the precise nature of the vision for post-apocalypse Naples all suggest continuities between Fuoco su Napoli and Di questa vita menzognera, but without the playful engagement with critical theorization. Ventre’s dream for the reconstruction of Naples is, like the Negromontes’, premised on the commodification of the city’s historical and cultural heritage, in accordance with the ‘cultural turn’ of the ‘Neapolitan Renaissance’. As set out in a series of negotiations with his close collaborators in Naples, with another unnamed ‘Presidente’ at the national level, and with international investors endorsed by Cosa Nostra, Ventre’s proposal is to make of Naples ‘il gioiello del mondo’ (F, 116) [the jewel of the world] and ‘una capitale del turismo mondiale’ (F, 142) [a world tourism capital]. Reiterating key aspects of the Negromontes’ concept, Ventre variously describes his ambitions for the city’s renewal in terms of ‘un villaggio di elevatissimo livello turistico’ (F, 116) [a tourist village of the highest level], ‘un museo a cielo aperto’ (F, 116) [an open-air museum] and ‘il luna park della storia’ (F, 142) [the fairground of history]. The text thereby replicates Di questa vita menzognera’s subordination of Naples and its cultural heritage to a semiotics of tourism and its relegation of utopia to the logic of market capitalism.

However, the exclusive theme park envisaged by Ventre differs from that of the Negromontes in several respects. Contrary to Urry and Larsen’s intimation that themed spaces tend towards oversimplification of complex historical realities, Ventre’s vision preserves the historical stratification of the urban fabric and extends it to include the exhibition of the city’s destruction as a key attraction (‘la città distrutta, fumante, con ricorrenti alluvioni marine per le quali dovremo essere attrezzati’ (F, 142) [the destroyed, smouldering city, with recurrent coastal flooding for which we will have to be equipped]). However, it diverges from the Negromontes’ in expressly excluding the participation of the Neapolitan population, so that the scope of the utopian vision is limited to the materiality of the city. As Ventre clarifies, with the reconstruction of the city, ‘cambierà la destinazione d’uso’ (F, 115) [the intended use will change]; the citizens will be evacuated, never to return, and Naples will be reborn exclusively as a high-end tourist destination. A further difference is that, in contrast with the purely commercial motivation of the Negromontes, Ventre’s dream is underpinned by a deep attachment to the city and a desire to revitalize its artistic, cultural and architectural heritage. That attachment emerges in his various pronouncements about the city; for instance, he holds that the Naples of the past – ‘la città del controtempo […] la città del sonno […] la città dei sorrisi abusati, finti, illogici […] la città del presente eterno’ (F, 95) [the city out of time […] the city of sleep […] the city of abused, fake, illogical smiles […] the city of the eternal present] – has lost its fundamental essence, so that even the name of the city is now ‘vuoto, come quello di una persona cara che è morta’ (F, 95) [empty, like that of a loved one who has died]. Yet, although the body has been massacred, dismembered and dispersed, his insistence that ‘questo corpo si possa rianimare in un’unica carne’ (F, 96) [this corpse can be reanimated in single body] and the vehemence of his refrain, ‘Ci credo, ci devo credere, ci voglio credere’ (F, 96) [I believe it, I have to believe it, I want to believe it], demonstrate the depth of his devotion to Naples and his commitment to its revitalization.⁶³

Ventre’s understanding of the relationship between past and present-day Naples – echoed by various other characters throughout the novel – is indebted to Raffaele La Capria’s exploration of the myth of the city’s ‘lost harmony’.⁶⁴ In Ventre’s formulation, Naples – once the most maternal of cities, enabling her offspring to pass ‘da un’armonia all’altra’ [from one harmony to another] – has become ‘una madre distratta […] violata’ (F, 134) [a distracted […] violated mother], abandoning her offspring and offering them no solace.⁶⁵ Departing from La Capria’s account, Ventre attributes the transformation of Naples to the violence of modernity; observing the city from Via Posillipo, he discerns ‘architetture di antichità stupefatte, aggredite da superfetazioni modernistiche: un sabba di vecchio e nuovo’ (F, 46) [architecture of astonishing antiquity, assaulted by modernist superfetation: a witches’ sabbath of old and new]. Similarly, the panorama of Roman ruins stretching from Posillipo to Cuma appears ‘profanato e soffocato’ (F, 122) [desecrated and suffocated] by the rusting chimneys of the Bagnoli steelworks, the asphalt roads strangling the countryside and the cement vomited upon the landscape by rampant development, so that ‘i pezzi di quel che fu divino sono martoriati e dispersi’ (F, 122) [the pieces of what was divine are battered and dispersed].

Central to the utopianism of Ventre’s vision for the post-apocalyptic reconstruction of Naples is the aspiration to undo the ravages of modernity and restore the city to its past splendour:

Tutto quello che era stato costruito dopo la Seconda guerra mondiale andava inesorabilmente abbattuto. […] Così Napoli sarebbe diventata una città d’arte unica al mondo, una città dove nella stessa piazza si sarebbe vista sotto calpestii di cristallo antiscivolo tutta la bellezza dell’architettura greca, e tutta la stratificazione di quella romana, mentre al livello dei camminanti sarebbe apparso lo splendore del Sette e Ottocento di case e palazzi. (F, 242)

[Everything that had been built after the second world war had to be relentlessly torn down. […] In this way, Naples would become a city of art, one of a kind, a city where in the same square all the beauty of the Greek architecture and all the layering of the Roman city would be visible under nonslip crystal pathways, while at the level of the pedestrians the splendour of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century houses and palaces would appear.]

The investment in the past as the solution to the failings of the present evokes recent scholarship on utopia and nostalgia. Building on Svetlana Boym’s identification of a ‘global epidemic of nostalgia’ in the twenty-first century, Zygmunt Bauman observes a shift from a forward-looking gaze that perceives history as progress to a backward-looking gaze that perceives history as a process of decline.⁶⁶ This shift crystallizes in the emergence of what he terms ‘retrotopias’, that is, ‘visions located in the lost/stolen/abandoned but undead past, instead of being tied to the not-yet unborn and so inexistent future’.⁶⁷ Bauman argues that deep-seated disenchantment with the future – now the seat of terrifying uncertainty and impending catastrophe rather than of collective progress – has redirected utopianism away from the future and towards ‘the buried (prematurely?) grand ideas of the past’.⁶⁸ Regarding the past as the roadmap to the best of all possible worlds is attractive, Bauman suggests, precisely because the backward glance is directed not to the past as it actually was but towards a rather more pliable and ‘vaguely remembered past’, capable of being reshaped in accordance with our desires and the politics of memory.⁶⁹

While Fuoco su Napoli is heavily imbued with what Bauman terms the ‘retrotopian romance with the past’, in one crucial respect Ventre’s vision for the reconstruction of Naples represents a radical new departure.⁷⁰ As outlined in a summit meeting with the Neapolitan clans, Ventre shares with the Bassolino administration a utopian ambition to reform not only the appearance of the city but also the mentality: ‘l’eruzione ha fatto il piano regolatore che aspettavo da anni. E non […] riformerà solo gli spazi. Dovrà essere un piano regolatre che riformi le teste, i pensieri, i procedimenti’ (F, 217) [the eruption has created the urban development plan I’ve been waiting for, for years. And it won’t […] just reform the space. It must be a plan that reforms minds, thoughts, processes]. As he goes on to clarify, what he envisages is less the civic mindedness intended by Bassolino or the ‘education of desire’ for a better way of living articulated by Levitas – this is rendered unnecessary by the elimination of the population at large from the city – but a reform of business practices among his peers.⁷¹ In short, the intention is to put an end not only to the ‘abusivismi costieri e vesuviani’ (F, 150) [illegal construction along the coast and on Vesuvius] but also to the practices of shared spoils, bribery and intimidation that have dominated to date. Instead, contracts for the reconstruction of the city will be awarded to large-scale consortia regulated by multinationals and the works completed by non-Neapolitan firms. In short, ‘la bonifica dei Campi Flegrei riguarda soprattutto l’illegalità’ (F, 217) [the reclamation of the Phlegrean Fields concerns illegality above all], so that the activities of the Camorra will be redirected, inter alia, away from narcotics and into a new trade in art: ‘Il traffico rimane. Cambia la droga. Cioè la droga si chiamerà Tintoretto, Michelangelo, Caravaggio, porcellane delle case reali, […] grandi mostre, […] casinò’ (F, 217) [The trafficking will remain. The drugs will change. That is, the drugs will be called Tintoretto, Michelangelo, Caravaggio, porcelain from royal houses, […] great exhibitions, […] casinos].

If Ventre’s utopian dream appears to promise a radical abolition of criminality and the moral renewal of Naples, it is compromised at the outset by its elimination of the Neapolitan population amid what is effectively a coup, and its complicity with a corrupt political order. The former speaks not to utopian aspiration but to tyrannical megalomania and dystopian despair – capitulation to historical discourses and lingering stereotypes that paint the city’s inhabitants as primitive, morally suspect and beyond redemption or improvement.⁷² The latter, instead, manifests in Ventre’s understanding of politics as ‘un crimine filosofico’ (F, 216) [philosophical crime], that is, a crime unrecognized as such because commonly held to be constructive, civic and legal. That understanding is verified by Ventre’s dealings with the unnamed Presidente whose ready acceptance of mafia participation in the reconstruction of the city suggests – like his counterpart in Di questa vita menzognera – implicit allusion to Berlusconi, whose political career has been dogged by accusations of mafia involvement.⁷³ Ventre openly discusses with the Presidente the electoral benefits that will accrue to the government in exchange for its provision of the political and financial reassurances required by his international investors. He also freely discloses that those investors understand that ‘la mafia e il potere non servono né per uccidere, né per estorsione: servono per trattare, servono per determinare’ (F, 116) [the mafia and power serve neither for killing, nor for extortion; they serve to negotiate, they serve to determine]. It is clear from such exchanges that Ventre is speaking entre nous and that the Presidente, far from being a hostile opponent of organized crime and upholder of law and order, is sympathetic to Ventre’s construction of the mafia as a form of art, historically equated with ‘baldanza, orgoglio, perfezione, eccellenza’ (F, 116) [boldness, pride, perfection, excellence].

In view of such compromised foundations, it is perhaps inevitable that the utopian dream of the reconstruction of Naples in accordance with its past splendours comes crashing down along with the apocalyptic destruction of the city. As the events predicted unfold and the city is engulfed in fire and flood, a power struggle erupts among the Camorra clans and the narrative descends into a frenzy of conspiracy, vendetta and violence. Consumed with paranoid jealousy and overreaching ambition, Ventre orders the murder of a presumed contender for Luce’s affections and goes to war with the rival Lerro clan. The violence culminates in the gang rape of Luce by Lerro’s men, in revenge for Ventre’s filmed sexual encounter with Lerro’s wife, and in a bloody shoot-out which results in Ventre being shot dead by his brother, in defence of Luce.

The death of Ventre signals the end of the utopian dream; without him to lead the reconstruction of the city, the US investors withdraw and the power vacuum created by his death threatens to ensure that ‘sul corpo di Napoli dovessero fare banchetto le tigri, le ieni, i corvi, gli avvoltoi, gli uccelli di passaggio, i vermi e le mosche, scornandosi fra di loro ora e sempre nei secoli dei secoli’ (F, 243) [tigers, hyenas, crows, vultures, birds of passage, worms and flies would feast on the body of Naples, fighting among themselves now and forever and ever]. The dystopian quality of that bleak scenario is countered, however, by the survival of Luce, embodiment of Naples, against the odds. The alignment between Luce and Naples is recalled precisely in the moment of her rape – ‘si sentiva violata, come Napoli. Ma come Napoli sapeva di poter sopravvivere a tutte le violazioni’ (F, 226) [she felt violated, like Naples. But like Naples she knew that she would survive all the violations] – so that her survival provides a scintilla of hope that Naples too might survive and be restored to vitality. The persistence of that hope implies the resilience not only of Naples, perhaps, but also of utopianism itself, even in the wake of its deeply flawed manifestation in the megalomaniac drive and retrotopian vision of Diego Ventre. As Albanese suggests, the survival of Luce implies that ‘the only conceivable happy future will be brought about not by a neoliberal approach to rebuilding the devastated city but by reconnecting with the city’s cultural and material foundations, rather than exploiting them for the sake of profit’.⁷⁴

Conclusion: Utopia as critique

In uniting apocalyptic fantasy with utopian visions of rebuilding Naples anew in the form of a heritage theme park, Montesano’s Di questa vita menzognera and Cappuccio’s Fuoco su Napoli take aim at the cultural politics underpinning the ‘Neapolitan Renaissance’ of the 1990s. They implicitly acknowledge the utopianism of the Bassolino administration’s plans for the revitalization of the city but warn of the potential for such utopian dreaming to result in dystopian reality. That both novels fantasize about the exploitation of the city’s heritage on the part of organized crime suggests that they may be giving voice to wider anxieties about the expansion of Camorra power in the early 2000s and the vulnerability of the culture industries to infiltration by a new generation of camorristi adept at exploiting the neoliberal economy and alert to the commercial potential of Naples’ artistic and cultural wealth.

At the same time, the fact that both texts, in their different ways, envisage the imaginary reconstruction of Naples as a simulation of the city’s historical forms speaks to an abiding sense that Naples’ best days are behind it. Indeed, for Francesco Durante, the novels give expression to the ‘senso di morte-da-troppa-vita’ [sense of death-by-too-much-life] pervading contemporary Naples and manifesting in a ‘mania museale’ [museum mania] – an obsession with preserving the positive contributions to the city in the face of anxiety about its present condition.⁷⁵ Equally significant is the fact that, in both instances, the past with which the ‘retrotopian romance with the past’ is concerned predates the formation of the Italian nation-state and the loss of Naples’ capital city status. In view of that fact, the role played in both texts by the unnamed Presidente, representative of national government and complicit in the subordination of Naples and its inhabitants to the whims of criminal overlords, is telling. Rather than endorsing Frank Kermode’s intuition that ‘it is natural that people should look from the evils of the present, brought to them by a deplorable past […], to a better future’, the novels present a decidedly bleak assessment of the potential for the moral and material regeneration of Naples under existing political and institutional conditions.⁷⁶ They lend credence instead to Bauman’s identification that the pendulum of public hopes has swung away from investment in the future and towards a vaguely remembered past.

In simultaneously evoking and critiquing utopia, Di questa vita menzognera and Fuoco su Napoli raise questions about the role of utopianism not only in Naples but in late modernity more generally. Where Di questa vita menzognera implies that, in the society of the spectacle, the urban utopia may be envisaged only in the form of the theme park and articulated as pastiche, Fuoco su Napoli is concerned with the dangers of utopian thinking in the context of an anti-democratic alliance between global capital, organized crime and a morally and politically compromised Italian nation state. Ultimately, despite their open endings, both novels gesture towards rather bleak conclusions. Reviewing them in the light of Krishnan Kumar’s contention that ‘while utopian societies [a]re ideal, in the sense of the best possible, anti-utopian society represent[s] merely the victory or tyranny of the idea’, we might conclude that, where Di questa vita menzognera presents a vision of utopia without utopianism and points to the tyranny of utopia as product, Fuoco su Napoli depicts utopianism as megalomania and evokes the tyranny of utopia as process.⁷⁷ The triumph of tyranny in both cases suggests a pressing need to reclaim the city from theme park utopianism and to harness utopia once again to the project of reimagining the city as a democratic and inclusive site of community and human connection.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The author would like to acknowledge the AHRC for funding towards the ‘Naples and the Nation’ project, grant. no. AH/R014876/1.

Footnotes