Bertinoro, 14-21 september 2003
"Contamination"
In order to circumscribe this theme it
is necessary to make some terminological distinctions. The term "contamination"
(contamination, contaminazione, Kontamination, contaminación)
has a vast application in most European languages and a not often clear
relationship (sometimes it overlaps, sometimes it maintains a distinction),
with its synonym "contagion" (contagion, contagio, Ansteckung,
contagion): the linguists have identified for both terms a common Indo-European
root in the word tag, which contains the meaning of "tact",
"contact", "transmission" (cf. lat. tactum, contingo
etc). In some European languages, as for instance Italian or Spanish,
the semantic field of the couple contaminazione/contagio or contaminación/contagio
is very wide; in other European languages, the variety of meanings is
less great. In their wider versions, the two terms tend to include the
meanings of "contact", "transfer", "infection",
"epidemics", "transmission", "diffusion",
"adulteration", "infestation", "poisoning",
"pollution" (the effects of "defiling" or "making
foul"), but also those of "intermixing", "intermingling",
"interaction", "hybridization".
In any case the numerous shades of meaning of the terms "contamination"
and "contagion" allow us to distinguish between different
lines of interpretations of our subject:
1. Physical contamination. It is the
most ordinary meaning and it refers to a vast range of phenomena, which
have played an important role in the literary and artistic imagination
of our cultures, and, starting with the last century, also in the cinematographic
one. First and foremost: the contamination provoked by infectious diseases,
from the plague described in the Iliad or in Oedipus Rex to the most
horrible apocalyptic stories narrated in postmodern science fiction,
which constitute significant examples of the tendency to treat an illnesses
as a "metaphor" of a larger cultural disease, as studied by
Susan Sontag in her essays. This type of contamination includes also:
1) the environmental contamination: from the natural disruptions caused
by wars to the ecological preoccupations nourished by many contemporary
writers; and 2) the intermixing and hybridization of the human races,
sexual genres and identities, animal species (two emblematic titles:
in literature, The Island of Doctor Moreau by H. G. Wells; in the cinema,
The Fly by David Cronenberg).
2. Contamination as diffusion and propagation
of social behavior. In this category we should include the complex web
of forms of transmission which take place in human groups and societies,
such as laughing or yawning by contagion, or the diffusion of gossip,
popular sayings, funny stories, urban legends, social habits, and fashions,
or even the propagation of superstitious or religious beliefs, or the
episodes of so-called "collective hysteria" (as for instance
the reaction to the famous radio broadcast by Orson Welles of an imaginary
invasion by Martians). Somewhat similar to this type of phenomena is
also the mechanism that regulates the origin and evolution of folk-tales,
which are transmitted orally from one narrator to another, from a community
to another, from one culture to another, and are continuously enriched
and transformed by the contamination with the traditional components
that are provided by the new contexts (see the theories of Claude Lévi-Strauss
on the formation and functioning of the mythological lore or the reflections
of Milman Parry and Albert Lord on the oral origin of the Homeric poems).
Viewed from a diachronic perspective this is what has happened - after
the transformation from oral transmission to writing - also in the constructions
of literary traditions (see the mechanisms that regulate intertextuality:
from imitation to plagiarism, from "poetic memory" to the
"anxiety of influence", from the reworking of significant
themes to the constitution of a canon).
3. The transmission of psychic experiences
through supposed contagion. It is the case of some neurotic or even
psychic symptoms, which seem to be transmitted by a sort of contagion.
One can think of the hysteric syndrome of the protagonist in Ugo Iginio
Tarchetti's Fosca, of the petty maniacal obsessions of Zeno in Italo
Svevo's novel, of the linguistic "tics" of Bartleby in Melville's
famous story, of the paranoia of persecution in many postmodern novels,
of the compassionate and perfectly conscious imitation of the illness
in Rainer Maria Rilke's Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge.
With this last meaning, as found in Rilke, the meaning of contamination
and contagion gets very close to that of "imitation".
4. Moral contamination in a wide sense.
An enormous place has been taken, in literary representation, by "contaminated
guilt". This kind of guilt, when it takes up the meaning of "hereditary
guilt" (the faults of the fathers that fall on their children,
the rite of expiation transferred to the next generation, or the moral
or dispositional "rottenness" which is passed on from one
generation to the next, along the same genealogical lines) is a strong
and pervasive theme both of traditional cultures and of modern literature.
The Nineteenth-Century novel exploits frequently this theme: think,
just to make an example, how the moral features of the lineage "Linton"
and of the lineage "Earnshaw" are transmitted and intertwined
in Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights. Novelists like Zola took up
this subject and combined it with the scientific discourse of Darwinian
hereditariness. In Western culture successive to the Shoah, moreover,
guilt becomes a specific cultural contamination (Primo Levi in La tregua
speaks of the "unhealable nature of the outrage that spreads like
a contagion"). This particular aspect offers the possibility of
a double reading of the theme of contamination: 1) in a temporal perspective
(we could even say: in a deterministic-hereditary perspective, if we
took into account themes such as the intermingling of races or the hereditary
transmission of traits and features as explained by Charles Darwin in
the chapter on "hybridization" in The Origin of Species),
or 2) in a spatial perspective, with all the implications of relativism
and chaos (from the transmittal of viruses to the theories of entropy).
5. Cultural contamination. Another theoretical
implication of this theme is the opposition between the categories of
purity and of hybridization, as reflected in the moments of self-awareness
and self-identity of all cultures, when they define themselves in relationship
with the "other" cultures. To this phenomenology belong experiences
such as those of linguistic or racial intermixture, religious syncretism,
encounters among habits and customs of different provenance. These encounters
are sometimes viewed as forms of enrichment of specific traditions,
at other times as threats that might cause the dissolution of an often
hypothetical or mythical and original "uncontaminated" identity.
6. Contamination of forms. One last possibility is that offered by the contamination or hybridization of literary or artistic forms: types of discourses, different genres of representation, etc. We can apply the term contamination to all the rhetorical phenomena, which disrupt the order of a literary or artistic system, or more in general of an aesthetic one, intermingling different languages and codes, undermining the integrity of the models handed down from the past. In the field of the figurative arts or of architecture, movements such as the pop art or postmodernism have often exploited the possibilities of contamination and hybridization. The intermingling of traditions and genres is one of the fundamental laws that preside to the evolution of the musical forms. In the field of literature, contamination constitutes a powerful instrument for all formal innovation and research, often operating by means of parody, debasement, ironic manipulation of stylistic levels and modes. The central form of modern literature, the novel, was born entirely under the sign of contamination, and has grown grace to its capacity of absorbing and integrating various forms and modes of discourse, thus breaking all aesthetic and social boundaries.
Executive Committee
Roberto Bigazzi
Laura Caretti
Remo Ceserani
Orsetta Innocenti
Donata Meneghelli
Simona Micali
Pierluigi Pellini
Marina Polacco