Superuomini e no : Dannunzian hypotexts in Capuana’s Rassegnazione

Abstract

Parallels have long been noted between Luigi Capuana’s novel Rassegnazione (1907) and D’Annunzio’s Le vergini delle rocce (1895), both of which recount an attempt to breed a Nietzschean superuomo. There is disagreement, however, as to whether Capuana parodies or emulates his source. This article argues that previous analyses err in seeing both D’Annunzio’s aesthetics and Capuana’s response to them as unchanging. It shows that Rassegnazione polemically contrasts the protagonists of D’Annunzio’s early Romanzi della Rosa with his later superuomini, and reacts not to a monolithic dannunzianesimo but to D’Annunzio’s evolving thought and practice. Reading the novel against Capuana’s intense critical engagement with D’Annunzio’s fiction from Il piacere (1889) to Il fuoco (1900), and charting the presence of several significant Dannunzian hypotexts, it concludes that while Capuana clearly debunks superomismo, he does not definitively reject D’Annunzio’s ideal of art-in-life.