Word: gramsci
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Mindful that the work was composed in 1787, on the eve of the French Revolution, Losey chooses to see it as a drama of conflict between a cynical, depleted ancìen régime and the exploited lower orders. He tacks on an epigraph from Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci: ". . . the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum, a great variety of morbid symptoms appears." His Don, solemnly played by Ruggero Raimondi, is a joyless, brooding creature whose compulsive sexuality is merely a neurotic reflection of social tensions. Losey gives us the least passionate seducer...
...kept him from adopting a stance that was really progressive (and-or practical), so his political conscience interferred with his artistic development, pushing his work further and further towards simplistic allegory. His early pastoral poetry hardened into a black-and-white vision in his later works. Le Cenere di Gramsci written in the early fifties, already sees the world divided between an innocent proletariat (an urbanized "noble savage") and an evil, decadent bourgeoisie. His prose development follows a similar pattern; a growing rigidity of perception is apparent when one compares "Ragazzi di vita" (also written in the fifties...
...Gramsci and Jaures back on the shelf...
...discussing the masters' ideology, Genovese relies heavily on the writings of Antonio Gramsci, the author of the The Modern Prince who helped to found the Italian Communist party. Gramsci is just one of dozens of the unexpected writers cited in Roll, Jordan, Roll--the others range from Hegel, Brecht, T.S. Eliot and Robert Lowell to historians of Italian slavery and traditional Japan. But Genovese devotes special attention to Gramsci, with his stress on the role played by a society's ruling ideas in ligitmizing--indeed, giving the appearance of inevitability to--its practice, not just among the ruling class...