History and invention

The relationship between History and invention is a central theme in Manzoni’s poetics. On the one hand it is related to his deep need to represent truth, and on the other it is a feature of his own Romanticism as well as of Italian and European romantic literature (in, for example, the birth of the historical novel). Manzoni clarified his own interpretation of the relationship in his Lettre to Chauvet, where he discusses historical drama and considers the role of the poet in relation to that of the historiographer. Whereas the latter reconstructs the historical facts “from the outside”, using (often unsatisfactory) documentary evidence, the poet reconstructs the historical facts “from within”, recreating by artistic means the sentiments, inner conflicts, desires, thoughts, and discourses of the protagonists of those facts. What the dramatic poet does, therefore, is add the part of History that is “missing”, the part that we will never find in documents (elsewhere Manzoni describes it as replacing the “flesh” on the “skeleton” we are left with). To do this, the poet uses invention, but it must be verisimilar, respectful of the historical data, and must avoid “novelistic” falsification of the personality of characters brought back to life by poetic means. Undoubtedly Manzoni saw the dramatist’s task as arduous and contradictory. The poet had to “invent” the soul of the character, but as though it were the “true” soul of the historical figure, with no help from any historical documents. Manzoni was well aware of the inherent contradiction, which on the one hand risked falsifying History and on the other limited freedom of invention (for example, he perceived the “novelistic” aspect, namely a “falsehood”, in the figure of Adelchi, which in theory he should have avoided). Switching to the novel enabled Manzoni to redefine the terms of the question, lending greater autonomy and legitimacy to invention, and restoring its potential to represent the writer’s ideal world which went unexpressed in his tragedies on account of his own historiographic meticulousness.