<b>Antonio Gramsci’s Dante: a Realism without Mimesis

Abstract

Antonio Gramsci in his Prison Notebooks constructs an ‘anti-Crocean’ reading of Dante Alighieri’s Inferno X. It is an interpretation based on the conception of the textual lacuna – manifested by Dante’s silence in front of Cavalcante de’ Cavalcanti, one of the protagonists of Dante’s canto – as a strategy of cultural and, at the same time, political and social nature. Poetry is not reduced to ‘poetic’. Gramsci, in fact, rejects the idea of literature as a phenomen sterilely ‘superstructural’: reading Inferno X, on the contrary, means for Gramsci understanding how Dantesque poetry is neither a mimesis nor a representation, but an immanent reality: part of an organic totality, in which each element – a cultural element as a literary work, for example – constitutes an articulation of the whole. This study intends to indicate in the Gramscian interpretation of Canto X an attempt to find within textual lacunas not the manifestation – as Benedetto Croce (1921) believed – of the ineffable and prelogical dimension of intuition, but the presuppositions for an active and creative role of the reader: a rational, ideological articulation of the connection between the cultural, political and economic level of the society understood as a whole.