The anti-novel

Manzoni wrote and re-wrote his novel in various stages according to his own literary poetics, namely, with a goal of depicting a reality that was verisimilar, mixing historical facts and invention in a reliable and believable way. Readers of his novel (a historical novel, like those of Scott) are meant to believe that the story of the young couple and their relationship to contemporary history are “true”, and are supposedly fully involved in their situation. Yet the author of the Promessi Sposi deploys a sophisticated strategy of disenchantment, throwing readers off-guard, starting with the artifice of the rediscovered manuscript, which creates a double narrator and thereby a dual source of “truth”. Between the lines of his novel, a genre which in itself sets out to beguile readers, the voice of the anti-novel can be discerned (modelled on Sterne): a critical voice that disenchants readers, warning them that they are dealing with fiction, a sham. This strategy emerges for example when the author foregrounds himself, presenting himself to readers as the “director” of the novelistic fiction (as in the “night of deception”, in Chapter VIII). In the very act of writing a novel, Manzoni offers criticisms of the genre (which he described as untruthful in his Lettre to Chauvet). In particular, he criticizes the falseness of the traditional “happy ending”. Indeed, this was why, among the many revisions to the prima minuta, he added two chapters (XXXVII e XXXVIII) that considerably amplify the ending of Fermo e Lucia. In these chapters, the author acts as a showman or puppeteer calling his characters back on to the stage, thereby showing readers that they are fictitious and invented, but he also “disrupts” the “happy ending” by telling readers about displeasing details in the married life of the protagonists, such as the villagers’ disappointment that Lucia was not the beautiful heroine they had expected (in a love story), but only averagely attractive, if not downright ugly.