Unbury that Body The Tragic Palinode of a Generation in Marco Baliani’s Corpo di stato more

Chapter 7 v Unbury that Body The Tragic Palinode of a Generation in Marco Baliani’s Corpo di stato Nicoletta Marini Maio ‘The very nature of memory’, notes Luisa Passerini, ‘implies its capacity to resist violence: any power which tries to break, nullify, or distort memory, cannot do it without leaving traces, and such traces are indeed silences and forms of forgetting’.1 Any attempt to retrieve memories, Passerini continues, therefore produces ‘meanings and interpretations, strategic in character and capable of inf luencing the present’.2 On a similar note, Jeffrey Prager sees the act of memory as produced by ‘selves capable of resisting dominant cultural modes of thinking [...] able to symbolically mediate between possibilities and to exercise reasoned and ref lective judgment’.3 Marco Baliani’s dramatic monologue Corpo di Stato. Il delitto Moro: Una generazione divisa (1998) is one such acts of resistance and strategic actions. Adopting the rhetoric of the palinode and the anthropological and theatrical interpretation of mythological archetypes, Corpo di Stato performs a subjective recollection of the lotta armata and of the sequestration and killing of Aldo Moro. Baliani’s re-memorization of the past is shaped as a collective rite of mourning through which the self of the author-narrator ref lects on and mediates with his entire generation, both taking responsibility for the deeds of the lotta armata in the 1970s and at the same time abjuring them. This essay offers a preliminary analysis of Corpo di Stato, an example of theatrical representation of the Moro case in the form that I have called ‘tragic palinode’.4 Properly speaking, a palinode is a work of poetry recanting or retracting a view expressed in a former poem.5 In broader terms, a palinode is a re-reading or a retraction of an earlier statement, sentiment, or idea. In the course of my research, I identified two divergent cultural configurations of the Moro case — namely, the mystery story, or giallo, and the tragic palinode. The mystery story includes the many readings of the event spanning from the crime story to the conspiracy plot, while the tragic palinode centres on the retraction and sense of guilt of the protagonists of the anni di piombo. In this second emplotment, the tone of retraction characteristic of the palinode is intertwined with the tragic mode and emphasizes the tension between controversial interpretations of good and evil.6 In the effort to understand contemporary Italian culture’s obligation with respect to the ‘unburied body’ of Aldo Moro, my analysis of Baliani’s Corpo di Stato returns to the classical 10-Chap 7-Maio.indd 122 25/7/11 16:31:02 Unbury that Body 123 mythic archetype of Antigone, which underlies the actor-narrator’s mournful lamentation for the ideological demise of the generation that led the militant activity of the 1970s ultra-left groups, activity that subsequently transformed into what Dini and Manconi define as the ‘discorso delle armi’.7 I argue that over the years the victimization of Aldo Moro, dramaturgic nucleus of the monologue, has changed from a scapegoat rite to a collective assumption of responsibility. This representation of the abduction and assassination of Moro has maintained the basic components of tragedy — that is, the conf lict between individual and power, hybris, tragic guilt, the complexity of the notions of good and evil, and the involvement of the collective subject — and yet it has assumed the form of a palinode, namely, a retraction of the past and, on a metaphorical level, its rewriting. In 1998 the Italian public television channel Raidue commissioned Marco Baliani to create a theatrical work in memory of Aldo Moro, a work that would be broadcast live on 9 May to commemorate the twentieth anniversary of the assassination of Moro by the Brigate Rosse (BR).8 After a scrupulous effort of documentation, Baliani composed the monologue Corpo di Stato that he performed at the suggestive Mercati Traianei (or Foro di Augusto) in Rome under the direction of Maria Maglietta.9 Since then, Corpo di Stato has been staged numerous times in other theatres and public spaces, either for commemorative reasons or cultural interest, and has become a theatrical classic in the representation of the Moro case.10 Corpo di Stato recounts the fifty-four days of the abduction and assassination of Aldo Moro by creating a narrative map that combines official history (or macrohistory) with the ‘piccole storie’ and images sedimented in individual and collective memory (or micro-history).11 Corpo di Stato, in fact, is not a reconstruction of factual occurrences but rather a journey through the years of the anni di piombo which saw the parable of the revolutionary movements deteriorate into tragedy.12 The monologue begins and ends with the juxtaposition of the dramatic deaths of Aldo Moro and of the Sicilian far-leftwing activist Peppino Impastato, murdered on the same day as Moro by local mafiosi for his pressing public denunciation of their crimes. Alternating past and present, drama and narration, memories and selfref lection, Baliani provides a ‘dichiarata visione soggettiva’ of the events from an autobiographical perspective.13 His narrative conjures up faces and stories of friends and extremist leaders, and recollects decisive events such as a student assembly in 1972 where a hyper-politicized nucleus voted to join the armed struggle. The narrator’s voice coincides not only with that of the author but, unusually in Baliani’s theatre, also with that of the narrated self. It unifies the fragments of memory and invokes the images and myths of an entire generation in the moment of their decay. Corpo di Stato must be regarded in the context of two fundamental features: first, its association with the civic, political, and psychological goals of the teatro di narrazione, and, second, its extra-dramaturgic nature as a commemorative work commissioned by public television, a ‘richiesta esterna alle ragioni del teatro’.14 Only later would it become an actual theatrical production and be performed on regular stages with some structural variations. These elements have contributed to the characterization of the monologue in terms of genre, style, dramatic expressivity, and content. 10-Chap 7-Maio.indd 123 25/7/11 16:31:02 124 Nicoletta Marini Maio Before assuming the more stable shape of a dramatic written text, published only in 2003, the monologue was originally elaborated in the form of an oral f low, as is typical of teatro di narrazione, in which dramaturgy is seen as an act of creation taking place directly on the stage, in the context of its exposition. The teatro di narrazione is an original Italian theatrical trend, and Baliani is acknowledged as one of its most authoritative representatives along with the playwrights and actors Ascanio Celestini, Laura Curino, and Marco Paolini, among others.15 It developed in the 1990s in the framework of teatro civile, a well established national tradition that was a product of the militant, 1970s-era activity of Dario Fo.16 In the teatro di narrazione, Fo’s conception of theatre as an instrument of political activism and as a performative recollection of popular memories has merged with Pasolini’s ‘teatro di parola’ and with various international forms, such as Grotowski’s ‘poor’ and Barba’s intercultural theatre.17 This new type of performance rejects dramatic action in its conventional sense and pivots around the central role of the narrator, often the only character on stage, who is thus simultaneously subject, body, actor, and author. The narrator performs a subjective account of a historical fact or of a literary text, emphasizing the relationship between personal and collective experiences using the expressive means offered by the stage. The audience, in Pasolini’s words, listens instead of watching, and is not only considered the recipient of the narrator’s aesthetic and political message, but is also identified with the entire community — they share the narrator’s experience, history, and civic responsibility.18 Echoing Pasolini’s theatrical ‘Manifesto’, the teatro di narrazione shows its incompatibility with both traditional and avant-garde theatre. Its function is close to that assigned by Pasolini to the teatro di parola, which, in Pasolini’s words, has only a cultural interest common to the author, to the actors, and to the spectators, who, gathering together, perform a ‘rito culturale’.19 The teatro di narrazione performs a similar rite. As Baliani emphasizes,‘Il narratore non è un interprete e, come diceva Pasolini, nemmeno l’attore è un interprete, ma un uomo di cultura; e io sono pienamente d’accordo col fatto che attore e narratore abbiano compiti culturali e non rappresentativi’.20 The ‘sintesi umana’ represented by the collective body of the narrator, the author, the actor, and the audience has made evident theatre’s potential as a means of entertainment and at the same time of preservation and public elaboration of collective memories.21 In this sense, the teatro di narrazione, which has enjoyed an extraordinarily favourable reception in Italian theatres and on television for more than a decade, has re-enacted the primitive, powerful function of theatre as a communicative tool among the members of the polis.22 Beside constituting an experience of communal remembering and testimony, as is typical in the teatro di narrazione, its status as a work commissioned by public television has made Corpo di Stato a public (if unconventional) rite of mourning. The scope of the monologue, therefore, exceeds the normal extent of a theatrical production and emphasizes its civic and historical function. 10-Chap 7-Maio.indd 124 25/7/11 16:31:03 Unbury that Body 125 Moro and the Dramatic Body The copious paratext surrounding the written version of the monologue offers considerable information about Baliani’s preparatory work, and provides details regarding literary, political, and historical themes, the dramaturgic conception and scope of the text, and the connotations of the title.23 Along with standard paratextual elements, the volume includes in fact a ‘Diario’, a sort of metatheatrical journal published in appendix to the actual monologue; a considerable number of documentary photos; and some pictures taken during the 1998 spectacle.24 As Baliani emphasizes in the ‘Diario’, the dramaturgic motor of the tragic conf lict performed in Corpo di Stato is Moro’s body. In Baliani’s words, its cumbersome physicality as a ‘corpo immolato/destinato’ is the ‘asse calamitante’ of his storytelling.25 The title of the monologue itself, Corpo di Stato, serves as a powerful indicator of the primary function of the body in the text. This apparently simple linguistic sequence encompasses several essential meanings.26 It denotes the body politic — that is, the powerful symbolic ensemble of the political establishment of which the corpse of Moro has become ‘una figura, una funzione’.27 Furthermore, it is a play on words, using the phonetic similarity between the words ‘corpo’ and ‘colpo’. The locution ‘corpo di Stato’, therefore, echoes the expression ‘colpo di Stato’, transforming the body of Moro into a residual symbol of political violence, a notion at the centre of the tragic conf lict both in Baliani’s monologue and in the historical event. The semantic field of political violence conjured up by the phrase ‘colpo di Stato’ mobilizes historical images of guilt, as in the opening of the ‘Diario’ when Baliani associates the body of Moro with the ‘carnaio’ of the Holocaust, a correlation that links recent Italian history with the collective tragedy of the western world.28 Finally, the expression ‘corpo di Stato’ literally suggests ‘l’idea di un corpo alla mercé di uno Stato’, a concept that implicitly invokes the dramatic conf lict of Sophocles’ Antigone.29 This third connotation in fact more directly projects the destiny of Polynices on that of Moro, as Baliani points out in ‘Diario’. Speculating on the multiple meanings of the title, he invokes ‘proprio quella scena antica, Antigone e il corpo insepolto del fratello’.30 Moro’s body plays a central role in triggering the process of remembering and the creation of dramatic scenarios. It is portrayed in its progressive transfiguration from a live material body to that of a spectral image that haunts the Hamletlike mind of the actor/narrator.31 In the vivid representation of the murder, for instance, the acoustic and visual reverberations produced by anaphors, pauses, questions, climactic accumulations, and interruptions recall the tragic enactment of a sacrificial rite, which dilates the moments preceding the death, producing images ‘ad alta densità’.32 The physical tension of the action reaches its acme in the ‘accasciarsi’ of the body and dissolves in the progressive metamorphosis of the corpse into a cumbersome residual carcass: ‘Cade, s’accascia. A terra, il corpo va già facendosi ingombro, cosa.’33 Throughout the monologue, the body of Moro materializes in the phantasmatic form of a ‘faccia’ that emanates from even the most prosaic places and inspires images of incarceration and death, stimulating an acute sense of guilt: 10-Chap 7-Maio.indd 125 25/7/11 16:31:03 126 Nicoletta Marini Maio Adesso invece, a vedere quella fotografia, la faccia di Aldo Moro davanti al simbolo delle Brigate rosse, con quella frezza bianca in testa, una faccia che mi era sempre stata indifferente, anzi avversaria, una faccia da prete, adesso, vederlo così, imprigionato, adesso quella faccia mi visitava come dovessi farmi carico io della sua reclusione.34 The effect recurs again later in the play, in the suggestion that ‘in quei giorni, tutte le volte che entravo in cucina e aprivo il frigorifero, la faccia di Aldo Moro mi guardava’.35 The dramatic counterpart of the body of Moro in Corpo di Stato is the corpse, or, rather, the lack of the corpse of Peppino Impastato. In so far as the body of Moro is cumbersome and incumbent, that of Impastato’s is dismembered and absent. Moro and Impastato are specular metaphors of the ideological drift of the far-leftwing movimento. While Moro is portrayed as the symbolic scapegoat of revolutionary violence, Impastato is characterized as the actor/narrator’s dramatic double. He is in fact the ‘voce che dice, che parla, che denuncia’ and performs the social, political, and civil role that the actor/narrator of the teatro di narrazione claims for himself.36 In aligning the assassination of Moro by the BR with the murder of Impastato by Sicilian mafia, Baliani’s reminiscences ‘telescope, superimpose, fuse’ the two events, which would be disconnected according to a rationalist cause and effect mechanism but are instead intertwined ‘along the lines of the collective history’.37 The association of the two corpses symbolically reproduces the material outcome of the problematic conf lict between the ideal ‘esigenza di rivolta contro l’ingiustizia’ and the ‘assunzione del ruolo di giustiziere’ within the far left, the conf lict staged in Corpo di Stato.38 Impastato, the ideal revolutionary who did not take up arms but rather carried out his revolt by voicing his denunciation on the radio, has disappeared. In contrast, Moro, the sacrificial victim of those who chose armed struggle as a means of rebellion, has assumed the form of a disquieting spectre asking for justice and self-ref lection. The gestation of Corpo di Stato mirrors the complexity of its generic categorization, halfway between the oral narration of a private painful experience and the public remembrance of a collective mournful event. ‘Diario’ begins with a lengthy dramatic reference to the tragic myth of Antigone, specifically, with the description of the unburied body of Polynices and the hybris of Antigone, who has already infringed ‘i divieti [... ed] è stata scoperta dalle guardie e condotta davanti a Creonte’.39 In his imagination, Baliani deems it necessary to see the three tragic figures all together, ‘non Antigone davanti a Creonte nel Palazzo, ma Creonte davanti a lei, lì fra i cadaveri e tra loro a terra, quel corpo eccellente, da non seppellire’.40 Placing the myth of Antigone at the core of the conception of Corpo di Stato ref lects Baliani’s intention to organize the theatrical rendition of the Moro affair as the recounting of a tragedy. As he argues in ‘Diario’, this historical event in fact appears already emplotted, to use Hayden White’s terminology, in the classic form of tragedy; it entails a tragic scenario and a sense of catharsis rendered possible by the killing of a scapegoat. In other terms, Baliani detects in the characterization of the Moro story the symbolic archetypes and the dynamics of conf lict inherent to tragedy as a literary genre and as a social rite. From this perspective, Baliani’s 10-Chap 7-Maio.indd 126 25/7/11 16:31:03 Unbury that Body 127 conforming to tragic rhetoric is not a stylistic choice, but rather a structural and ethical necessity. Baliani’s identification of the Moro event with a tragic spectacle is not entirely new. Several writers and scholars before him emphasized the theatrical nature of the event, suggesting that social actors (politicians, terrorists, the Moro family, the media, and public opinion) enacted a public dramatic plot. Following Victor Turner’s notion of ‘social drama’, which uses analysis of significant events to identify the cultural structures rooted in social life, Robin Wagner-Pacifici has claimed that the Moro affair lends itself to emplotment in a theatrical form.41 She argues that in the case of the Moro Affair ‘social actors themselves’ attempt ‘to direct certain events with, among other kinds of consciousness and motives (e.g., political, moral and economic), a theatrical self-consciousness’, performing a ritual that adheres to the cultural symbols of the community.42 According to Turner, ‘social drama’ encompasses four stages: ‘breach, crisis, redress, and either reintegration or recognition of schism’.43 Wagner-Pacifici applies Turner’s model to the Moro event and claims that the final act of the drama consists of a process of reintegration of the Italian nation, while at the same time Moro and his family are ironically excluded. However, she maintains that due to the polarization of the conf lict into basic notions of good and evil, as well as the fact that the social actors are not endowed with the personalities and motivations typical of tragic characters, the event is emplotted in the generic form of melodrama. From Wagner-Pacifici’s sociological perspective, framing the Moro affair as a melodrama responds to the need of the establishment to exert social control. The melodrama, in fact, erases complexity and ambiguity from the social scene, makes moral choices unproblematic, and inhibits further ref lection. In the melodramatic rendition of the event, for instance, negotiating for Moro’s rescue with individuals that incarnate the evil is simply deemed immoral: melodramatic simplifications do not allow subtleties or doubts. Framing the event as a tragedy, on the contrary, raises difficult moral questions and encourages critical thought, making moral judgment unstable and uncertain.44 Wagner-Pacifici studies the Moro case with a focus on the social and institutional actors that script the ‘social drama’ and is concerned ‘with the emplotment not of a literary work, nor a historical work, but rather of a dynamic process of living history’; she claims, nonetheless, that ‘the same mechanisms of generic choice and a combining of aesthetic perception and cognitive operations are salient in such a case’.45 Wagner-Pacifici’s seminal interpretation sheds light on the symbology of power in Italy, and on the spectacle that this power enacted in the Moro case. However, it does not justify the existence of the several fictional and non-fictional works that since 1978 have emplotted the Moro event as a tragedy. For instance, in L’affaire Moro, a pamphlet written close on the heels of the event, Leonardo Sciascia had already defined the Moro case as a ‘storia già opera letteraria’ displaying the ‘segni premonitori’ of ‘tragedia’.46 More recently, in L’ombra di Moro Adriano Sofri speculated on the tragic signifiers intrinsic in the history of the Moro Affair.47 The most relevant theatrical antecedent of Corpo di Stato is a tragedy: La tragedia di Aldo Moro composed by Dario Fo in 1979, a few months after the assassination of Moro. 10-Chap 7-Maio.indd 127 25/7/11 16:31:03 128 Nicoletta Marini Maio La tragedia, published in 1992 with the title Il caso Moro, is Dario Fo’s only tragic work.48 La tragedia, which the playwright admits to be very different from his other works, represents the Moro affair through the filter of the myth of Philoctetes, the Greek hero betrayed and abandoned by his fellows on the island of Lemnos for his infirmity.49 Compared with its fictional and non-fictional precursors, Corpo di Stato presents relevant elements of novelty. First of all, Baliani, who resolutely identifies the presence of tragic archetypes in the Moro affair, merges a tragic tone with the narrative style of the teatro di narrazione. This combination creates a dynamic f lux between the tragic machinery and the narrative mode. Second of all, in Corpo di Stato the dramatic subjects of the conf lict are not the array of terrorists, politicians, media, and public opinion that perform the sacrifice of Moro in the name of ‘their culture’s stock of sedimented symbols’, as Wagner-Pacifici emphasizes.50 In the tragic cast of the ‘social drama’, Baliani introduces only one social actor — that is, the generation that promoted and participated in the protests of the radical leftwing movimento in the late 1960s and 1970s, when political violence was considered a legitimate tool to accomplish revolutionary goals. This focus shades the Moro affair with complex nuances, doubts, and questions about the cultural, political, and psychological motivations of the terrorists and of those who had not ultimately joined them but who helped design a neutral or supportive landscape for their actions. Baliani’s choice, central in Corpo di Stato both as a cultural and a dramaturgic act, replaces melodramatic polarization (highlighted by WagnerPacifici) with tragic guilt, encouraging a process of critical self-ref lection. In Corpo di Stato, the narrator recounts that, like many radical protesters who supported more a vague magma of psychological aspirations than a coherent political project, he undertook a painful process of self-examination about his generation’s collective responsibilities when faced with the drama of the abduction and assassination of Moro. During this act of self-analysis, he detected a profound conf lict, realizing that the fifty-four days of the Moro event produced an internal ‘lacerazione’, perhaps latent until then, but that ‘solo allora si manifestò pienamente’.51 That event, the narrator argues, was a ‘spartiacque’ for his generation, which found itself irremediably divided. Those who had not taken up arms felt themselves ‘costretti al silenzio’ — that is, deprived of the ability to express opposition to power, the state, and the system.52 Guilt, mixed with a feeling of impotence in a situation that rejected critical dialogue, urged the narrator of Corpo di Stato to share the responsibility for the abduction of Moro, and prevailed over the sense of cohesion of his generation, which suffered a dramatic loss of identity.53 Baliani visually synthesizes this sense of loss through the powerful image of the body of Moro, a body that catastrophically drags away a historical age and an entire generation: [...] qui, nella storia di Moro, tutto precipitava fin dall’inizio verso la rovina, non solo la sua, fisica, materiale, ma del mondo che lo circondava, e in questo comprendevo anche me, la mia generazione, era come se il corpo di Moro si trascinasse dietro un intero periodo storico e ne rivelasse, ne mettesse a nudo, relazioni e contraddizioni.54 10-Chap 7-Maio.indd 128 25/7/11 16:31:03 Unbury that Body 129 It should now be clearer why Baliani invokes the tragic genre to represent the Moro affair, and more specifically why he chooses the classic conf lict about the burial of the dead in the myth of Antigone, staging a recollection of the tragic process through the collision of complex dramatic personae. Nonetheless, instead of an act of pity toward the dead or one of reconciliation with history, Corpo di Stato stages a status of tension through the cumbersome presence of a body ‘da non seppellire’: it is the material testimony of a collective trauma that still needs to be comprehended and articulated.55 Moro and antigone In Sophocles’ Antigone, the tragic conf lict takes place between Creon, personification of the state and of rational knowledge, who prohibits burying the corpse of Polynice for his violation of the laws of the city, and Antigone, incarnation of family ties and emotional instincts, who disregards the veto of her fraternal love. Creon’s request to abide by the ethical and legal obligations established by the state forces him to act to the detriment of affective bounds, while Antigone’s claim advocates for the unconditional pre-eminence of the reasons of the heart over the reason of state. The tragic clash between the political (Creon) and interior (Antigone) forces is ambiguous in Corpo di Stato and indeed reverses the canonical interpretation. Baliani is aware that the Moro event cannot be read according to the common understanding of the myth and that it reveals instead ‘sostanze diverse, anime nascoste’.56 As a work of narrative theatre, Corpo di Stato does not stage either the character of Antigone or that of Creon in dramatic form. These characters are rather archetypical constructions and cultural references conjured by the actor/narrator. In ‘Diario’, Baliani points out that the figure of Creon, or the reason of state, has a marginal position in Corpo di Stato because, paradoxically, in the Moro event the state seems to soothe the conf lict instead of triggering it. Contradicting the canonical character’s essential function, the Creon of the Moro event does not veto the burial of the dead but, on the contrary, wants to bury the body ‘in any possible way’: ‘Di là lo Stato di Creonte che in tutti modi non vuole seppellire il corpo ingombrante di Polinice, di qui lo Stato della fermezza che vorrebbe in qualsiasi modo dare sepoltura e rito al corpo ingombrante di Moro.’57 As Baliani recalls, Moro’s state funeral was carried out against his will. He had requested a private ceremony from which all ‘uomini del potere’ should be banned.58 Therefore, the state funeral was a grotesque public performance, enacted in absentia of the corpse. Baliani maintains that the urgency of the uomini del potere to bury the dead, or, better, to remove it from the political scene, is not the main focus of Corpo di Stato. His goal is not to depict the political Moro in his relationship with power and the state; he wants to ‘raccontare qualcos’altro’.59 This ‘different story’, a sort of self-projection of the figure of Antigone voiced by the narrator, is embodied by the collective actor that Corpo di Stato introduces in the ‘social drama’, that is, the entire generation that needs to publicly perform a rite of mourning in order to comprehend and come to terms with its past. The actor/narrator denounces the emotional support and the passive consensus that his generation offered to the armed struggle, even without materially joining the 10-Chap 7-Maio.indd 129 25/7/11 16:31:03 130 Nicoletta Marini Maio two. The particular generic conception of the monologue as a part of the teatro di narrazione and as a public commemorative rite reinforces its character as a collective emotional and intellectual experience and provides the setting for a communal act of retraction, namely, a palinode performed in front of the polis. The actor/narrator begins his public recantation by recollecting the very first moments of the Moro event, when he heard the announcement of the kidnapping of Moro. He admits that his first reaction to that news was excitement and starts questioning himself about it: Il 16 marzo del 1978, quando la radio cominciò a trasmettere dell’attacco di via Fani e del rapimento di Aldo Moro ... subito in quei primi istanti, fui preso da un senso di eccitazione, una specie di euforia. Lo so che potrei raccontare tutt’altro, non ci vuole molto, col senno di poi potrei dire che all’annuncio della radio provai sdegno, che condannai immediatamente l’azione delle Brigate rosse. No, non è vero, non andò così. Provai un senso di esaltazione. Com’era possible?60 In the effort both to understand and share his attempt to explain his emotional response to the event, the actor/narrator continues to ask questions. A Hamletlike figure, he explores the psychological repercussions of political violence on his psyche and on the collective psyche of his generation, and seeks to contextualize the eruption of violence of the 1970s, when all of a sudden his compagni started talking about weapons and warfare: Ma come si era arrivati a tutto questo? Com’era successo che amici, compagni di gruppo, di corteo, improvvisamente s’erano messi a parlare di armi? ... Armi... Ma d’altronde che si doveva fare se i poliziotti giravano travestiti da studenti durante le manifestazioni, con le pistole in mano, per provocare? ... Che dovevamo fare se i fascisti facevano esplodere bombe ammazzando gente innocente, aiutati magari dai servizi segreti, come nella strage di Piazza Fontana a Milano o a Piazza della Loggia a Brescia? Che dovevamo fare? Quand’è che lo scontro s’era fatto pesante, senza più controllo, quando? Quando s’era cominciato a parlare di guerra?61 The passage from the solipsistic ‘I’ of the initial self-analysis to the collective ‘we’ sets in motion a climactic wave of questions punctuated by anaphors (how ... how ... from ... from ... what ... what ... what ... when ... when), and marks the identification of the actor/narrator’s self with the generational body. In becoming plural, his voice reconnects with the compagni and shares his re-memorization of the past with the audience, assuming a choral role. The recollection of the compagni’s ‘small stories’ (Giorgio, Sara, Armando, Riccardo), however, leads the act of remembering to a position of compromise with and uncertainty about political violence. Using a poignant ‘historical’ present, the actor/narrator remembers himself stuck in an existential condition of a threshold: Sto fermo lì sulla soglia... Né con le Brigate rosse, né con lo Stato. Quando era uscito questo slogan sul giornale mi era sembrato così azzeccato, un ottimo modo per chiamarsi fuori ... Noi non ci stavamo, era semplice, né di qui né di là.62 10-Chap 7-Maio.indd 130 25/7/11 16:31:03 Unbury that Body 131 From this perspective, the actual tragedy emplotted in the Moro event is reconfigured: it consists not only of the death of Moro, but also of the symbolic suicide of the entire movimento sprung from ‘lo stesso ’68 ... gli stessi bisogni di eguaglianza, di giustizia’ and animated by the ‘stesso grande sogno’ which had burned all its myths and ideals on the fire of revolutionary violence:63 ‘Oggi mi domando se un intero movimento in quei giorni non si sia suicidato nello stesso modo, abbracciato alla stessa causa d’amore che l’aveva fatto nascere e crescere.’ 64 The mise-en-scène for the 1998 performance of Corpo di Stato mirrors the deterioration of the ‘great dream’. In the landscape of ruins of the Foro di Augusto, decayed ‘pezzi di un mondo che non c’è più’ cause ‘il corpo di Cesare ... appena accoltellato da Bruto e dai suoi’ to rematerialize. As the conclusion of Corpo di Stato claims, the men and women of the movimento ‘che non presero le armi e che erano la maggioranza’, have been forced by their sense of guilt to repress their disagreement with the political establishment in order not to feel involved in a sort of ideal contribution to the anni di piombo.65 Mourning the death of Moro while recalling the ‘small stories’ of those men and women, therefore, allows the metaphoric Antigone of Corpo di Stato to grieve the loss of the collective political and existential self embodied by the movimento. Corpo di Stato is the tragedy of a reversed Antigone, who does not need to bury, but to unbury the dead, and incessantly perform the drama of the assassination and the process leading to it, through the act of remembering. In Baliani’s work, the actor/narrator’s intimate remembrances find a way to connect with the collective memory and perform, like in the conclusion of the original version of the monologue broadcast in 1998, an appeal to remembering and storytelling in order to exorcize the return of the dead and their metamorphosis into shadows. Notes to Chapter 7 1. Luisa Passerini, ‘Memory’, History Workshop, 15 (Spring 1983), pp. 195–96 (p. 196). 2. Ibid., p. 195. 3. Jeffrey Prager, Presenting the Past: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Misremembering (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), p. 90. 4. This article is a condensed version of a chapter included in my manuscript-in-progress on the cultural representations of the armed struggle in Italy in the 1970s through the voices of its protagonists. Through the analysis of a corpus of cultural productions, including films, theatrical works, memoirs, and personal interviews, my research explores the tension between the individuals’ recollections of reality and its elaboration in the collective memory and history. My work focuses, in particular, on Aldo Moro’s abduction and assassination in 1978 by the Brigate Rosse and it shows how this case of political murder has been allegorized and embodied in the interplay between personal and public, subjective and objective versions of history, becoming a catalyst for political thought, intellectual investigation, and artistic production. 5. The term derives from the Greek πάλιν (palin, ‘again, backward’) and ώδή (ode, ‘song’). According to an ancient legend, Greek poet Stesichorus (632/629–556/553 BC) was blinded by Helen after blaming her in one of his poems for being the cause of the Trojan War. He regained his sight by composing a double retraction, the Palinode. A notable example of palinode in English is Chaucer’s The Legend of Good Women, written to recant his earlier defamation of women in Troilus and Criseyde. See the section on ‘Stesichorus’ in Charles Segal, ‘Archaic Choral Lyric’, in The Cambridge History of Classical Literature I: Greek Literature, ed. by P. E. Easterling and Bernard Macgregor Walker Knox (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 165–201 (pp. 186–210). 10-Chap 7-Maio.indd 131 25/7/11 16:31:03 132 Nicoletta Marini Maio 6. On the two emplotments of the Moro case as a mystery story and a tragic palinode, see my essay ‘A Spectre Is Haunting Italy: The Double “Emplotment” of the Moro Affair’, in Terrorism, Italian Style: Representations of Political Violence in Contemporary Italian Cinema, ed. by Ruth Glynn, Giancarlo Lombardi, and Alan O’Leary (London: IGRS Press, forthcoming 2011). I have borrowed the term ‘emplotment’ from Hayden White. He argues that a sequence of events is ‘gradually revealed to be a story of particular kind’ and is shaped into a narrative which is endowed with an allegorical meaning. The representation of the Moro affair claims, so to speak, the entitlement of narrative history, since it shows what White calls the ‘deep structure’ of the ‘poetics’ of history. See Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenthcentury Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973), pp. 7–11. 7. See Vittorio Dini and Luigi Manconi, Il discorso delle armi: L’ideologia terroristica nel linguaggio delle Brigate rosse e di Prima linea (Milan: Savelli, 1981). 8. The show was part of a fortunate series of theatrical productions broadcast by RAI 2 between September 1997 and September 1998. Beside Corpo di Stato, the series proposed Baliani’s Michele Koholhaas, Dario Fo’s Marino è libero! Marino è innocente!, Moni Ovadia’s Oylem Goylem, and Marco Paolini’s Vajont and Il Milione. 9. Maria Maglietta has worked with Baliani for the past twenty-five years as a director and playwright. With Baliani she has also founded the ‘Trickster teatro’ company. The TV direction of the event was by Eric Colombardo. The monologue was published some years later with the title Corpo di Stato: Il delitto Moro (Milan: Rizzoli, 2003). 10. As this essay was being completed, Marco Baliani and director Maria Maglietta were touring a number of universities and colleges in the USA, staging Corpo di Stato and holding lectures and seminars with Italian students and teachers. The tour (from 7 April to 10 May 2009) culminated with the round table ‘Da Gomorra a Corpo di Stato: Resistere narrando’ at the 2009 American Association for Italian Studies Annual Conference in New York City. The enthusiastic reception to Baliani’s performances, lectures, and residencies in the US speaks for the quality of his work and the relevance of Corpo di Stato in the comprehension and re-elaboration of this particular period of Italian culture and history. The annotated English translation of Corpo di Stato, translated by Nicoletta Marini Maio, Ellen Nerenberg, and Thomas Simpson, is forthcoming with Fairleigh Dickinson University Press in 2011 and includes a DVD from the North American tour. 11. Baliani argues that myths stem from ‘piccole storie’ and suggests exploring the ‘passato prossimo’ in search of such stories in order to create new myths, ‘perché ci hanno insegnato solo la Storia, mentre manca tutto il lavoro della microstoria, il lavoro degli Annales’. Oliviero Ponte di Pino, ‘Il racconto: Una conversazione con Marco Baliani (1995)’, in Kohlhaas, ed. by Marco Baliani and Roberto Rostagno (Perugia: Edizioni Corsare, 2001), p. 23. 12. See Silvia Bottiroli, Marco Baliani (Civitella in Val di Chiana, AR: Zona, 2005), p. 93. 13. Alessandra Ghiglione, ‘Introduction to brochure notes for Marco Baliani, Corpo di Stato. Il delitto Moro: una generazione divisa’, Trickster teatro Creazione and RAI 2 (1998). 14. Ibid. 15. The theatrical works by Baliani, Celestini, Curino, and Paolini focus on controversial events of Italian modern history. For instance, Baliani’s Corpo di Stato concerns the murder of Moro; Curino’s Olivetti concerns Camillo and Adriano Olivetti, founders of the Olivetti business empire; Paolini’s Il racconto del Vajont the tragedy of the 1963 Vajont Dam disaster; and Celestini’s Radio Clandestina and Scemo di guerra the Nazi-Fascist occupation of Rome and its subsequent American liberation. 16. The relationship between Fo and the teatro di narrazione is emphasized by Simone Soriani, ‘Dario Fo, il teatro di narrazione, la nuova “performance” epica. Per una genealogia d’un “quasigenere” ’, Forum Italicum, 39.2 (Fall 2005), pp. 620–48. 17. With regard to Pasolini’s notion of ‘teatro di parola’, see Pier Paolo Pasolini, ‘Manifesto per un nuovo teatro’, Nuovi argomenti, 9 (1968), pp. 6–22. Fo’s notion of political theatre is detectable in almost all his theatrical works, particularly in the prologues and in the numerous political comments and polemics with which he often interrupts his performances. Fo’s career as a playwright and actor has been characterized by the use of theatre as an active instrument of political struggle. Because of his problematic relationship with the ‘teatri stabili’ and with the 10-Chap 7-Maio.indd 132 25/7/11 16:31:04 Unbury that Body 133 Italian public TV channel, for more than thirty years Fo and his wife Franca Rame held their performances in factories, universities, and public squares. For a systematic elaboration of Fo’s thought on the politics and aesthetics of theatre, see Dario Fo, Manuale minimo dell’attore (Turin: Einaudi, 1997). Jerzy Grotowski, followed by his pupil Eugenio Barba, is the creator of ‘poor theatre,’ which eliminates all non-essentials — that is, costumes, sound effects, makeup, sets, lighting, and a strictly designed playing area — in an effort to redefine the relationship between actors and the audience. In 1986 he opened the Workcenter in Pontedera, Italy, where his ideas about theatre are still explored. 18. See Pasolini, ‘Manifesto’, p. 7. 19. Ibid., p. 22. 20. See Marco Baliani, ‘Esperienza — tempo — verità: un seminario sulla narrazione’, in La bottega dei narratori. Storie, laboratori e metodi di: Marco Baliani, Ascanio Celestini, Laura Curino, Marco Paolini, Gabriele Vacis, ed. by Gerardo Guccini (Rome: Dino Audino Editore, 2005), p. 63. Baliani makes explicit reference here to Pasolini’s ‘Manifesto per un nuovo teatro’, from which he quotes the passage about the teatro di parola, where the spectator listens to ideas instead of watching dramatic actions. 21. Ibid., p. 11. 22. The numerous and uninterrupted theatrical replicas of Baliani’s, Celestini’s, Curino’s, and Paolini’s works in the ‘teatri stabili’ of the most important Italian cities are a clear sign of the extraordinarily positive reception of the teatro di narrazione in Italy. In addition, the theatrical series broadcast on television in 1997 and 1998 was an unexpected success: Paolini’s Vajont, for instance, captured a surprising share of 15.78 %, with more than three million spectators. Cultural television programmes usually have a very limited audience and theatrical performances on television are considered minor productions, ‘roba adatta al massimo alla seconda serata [...] o magari ai quattro gatti e ai videoregistratori di Fuori orario’. Oliviero Ponte di Pino, ‘Le eccezioni e le regole: Sei spettacoli teatrali su Raidue’, in olivieropdp per la cultura del teatro e dello spettacolo dal vivo (1998) <http://www.trax.it/olivieropdp/teatrotv.htm> [accessed 11 February 2011]. Ponte di Pino provides detailed information about the history, the structure, and the reception of the series. 23. According to Gérard Genette, the paratext plays the role of a ‘threshold’ because it is the metaphorical ‘vestibule’ of the text ‘which offers anyone and everyone the possibility either of entering or of turning back’. See Gérard Genette, ‘Introduction to the Paratext’, New Literary History, 22 (1991), pp. 261–72 (p. 261). In other words, the paratext is the portal into the meaning of the work that will allow the reader to enter the book. In the case of Corpo di Stato, ‘Diario’ is an epitext — that is, is a peripheral part of the paratext that provides the readers with an approach to the monologue. 24. Marco Baliani, Corpo di Stato, pp. 75–76. 25. Ibid., p. 85. 26. See ibid., p. 76 for Baliani’s discussion of the main meanings of the title. 27. Ibid., p. 14. 28. Ibid., p. 75. 29. Ibid., p. 76. 30. Ibid., p. 77. 31. For a discussion on the spectral consistency of the figure of Moro in Italian culture, see again my essay ‘A Spectre is Haunting Italy’. 32. Baliani, Corpo di Stato, p. 87. 33. Ibid., p. 14. 34. Ibid., p. 27; my emphasis. 35. Ibid., p. 60; my emphasis. 36. Ibid., p. 15. 37. See Passerini, ‘Memory’, p. 195 for a discussion of how subjective memory operates in relationship with collective memory. 38. Ghiglione, ‘Introduction’. This conf lict is at the basis of Baliani’s most famous theatrical monologue, Kohlhaas, inspired by the eponymous work by Heinrich von Kleist. In Kohlhaas, the protagonist, facing the injustice of political power, chooses to embrace violent tactics in order to resolve the conf lict. See Marco Baliani and Roberto Rostagno, Kohlhaas. 10-Chap 7-Maio.indd 133 25/7/11 16:31:04 134 Nicoletta Marini Maio 39. Baliani, Corpo di Stato, p. 76. 40. Ibid., pp. 75–76. 41. Robin E. Wagner-Pacifici, The Moro Morality Play: Terrorism as Social Drama (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1986). With regard to Turner’s notion of ‘social drama’, see Victor Turner, ‘Social Dramas and Stories about Them’, Critical Inquiry, 7.1 (Autumn 1980), pp. 141–68. 42. Wagner-Pacifici, The Moro Morality Play, p. 7. 43. Turner, ‘Social Dramas’, p. 149; emphasis in original. 44. The implications of framing a ‘social drama’ as a tragedy or a melodrama are thoroughly investigated by Ron Eyerman, who compares the Moro Affair with the killing of the Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh in 2004. See Ron Eyerman, The Assassination of Theo Van Gogh: From Social Drama to Cultural Trauma (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008). 45. Wagner-Pacifici, The Moro Morality Play, p. 4. 46. See Leonardo Sciascia, L’affaire Moro con aggiunta la relazione parlamentare (Milan: Adelphi, 1978; repr. 1994), pp. 25–26. 47. See Adriano Sofri, L’ombra di Moro (Palermo: Sellerio, 1991). 48. See Dario Fo and Franca Rame, ‘Il caso Moro’, in Fabulazzo (Milan: Kaos, 1992), pp. 174–89. 49. Dario Fo’s comment on La tragedia is in Chiara Valentini, La storia di Dario Fo (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1997), pp. 186–87. For a detailed analysis of Fo’s tragedia, see Beatrice Alfonzetti, ‘Gli anni di piombo: Satira e tragedia in Dario Fo’, L’illluminista, 2–3 (2000), pp. 139–59. 50. Wagner-Pacifici, The Moro Morality Play, p. 7. 51. Baliani, Corpo di Stato, p. 17. 52. Ibid., pp. 17, 71. 53. Ibid., p. 27. 54. Ibid., pp. 86–87. 55. Ibid., p. 76. 56. Ibid. 57. Ibid., p. 85. 58. See Miguel Gotor, Aldo Moro: Lettere dalla prigionia (Turin: Einaudi, 2008), p. 154. 59. Baliani, Corpo di Stato, p. 16. 60. Ibid., pp. 17–18. 61. Ibid., pp. 28–29. 62. Ibid., p. 57. 63. Ibid., p. 71. 64. Ibid., p. 59. 65. Ibid., p. 71. 10-Chap 7-Maio.indd 134 25/7/11 16:31:04