Many important and exciting activities have been taking place at the University of Malta over the past few years. Following its highly successful conference on Juann Mamo in October 2013, the Department of Maltese organised a public lecture on Dun Karm under the title Dun Karm: His Hopes between Faith and Nationhood. The speaker was Dr Charlò-Carmel Camilleri, a lecturer at the University.
The material presented was extremely interesting and the debate that followed was intriguing, there being a sufficient number of people present to create the right atmosphere for a proper discussion. The same Department and L-Akkademja tal-Malti, together with the Department of History of Art, will be collaborating on a talk debating the relationship between Dun Karm and the painter Edward Caruana Dingli.
Research into a particular sphere cannot continue to be studied within the limitations of the same subject. In other words, we need to strengthen research by allowing it to coincide with research emerging from other academic spheres and this needs to be the dominant axiom in any form of study. Besides this, a particular subject must always be placed within the wider cultural spectrum.
We cannot continue to study Maltese without looking at Maltese-Mediterranean music and art, for example. And we cannot study the history of Maltese art without studying Maltese literature. All of this must be placed within the international context and also the socio-economic and political context.
Moreover, there is a need for this interdepartmental and intercultural approach to also involve existing political structures. Every political institution must take an organic interest in the interpretation of Dun Karm and in how, for example, Willie Apap is being analysed. Thus even the political class can begin to aggrandise its conscience in these fields (another Don Quichottian dream). We will not be studying Dun Karm under the rightful lens unless we compare his poetry to the works of George Preca, one of the fathers of modernism in painting, and later even with the works of the English Julian Trevelyan.
It is vital for us to study how different spheres of art represent and manifest their own set of social beliefs in radically different ways. This way the analysis of Dun Karm would be more visible and comprehensible. We can also observe interesting, albeit contradictory, parallels between Malta's national poet and Edward Caruana Dingli. In music there is Carmelo Pace, Paolino Vassallo and Josie Mallia Pulvirente. And within the present discourse it is very important to mention Giuseppe Caruana.
The study by Charlò Camilleri introduced certain interesting aspects, yet remained too introverted, with Dun Karm being interpreted according to sources from within Dun Karmian scholarship. All of this empirical data is extremely important, but the mistake is to stop there when this is only the beginning of a profound journey into the study of Malta's evolution as a modern state.
Dr Camilleri was correct when he showed that Dun Karm faithfully followed the anti-modernist philosophy which was an integral pediment for the conservative and reactionary politics of Pope Pius X.
Unfortunately, he gave the impression that this was a positive aspect, given the parameters of the time, or at least he tried to keep a safe distance from making an historical assessment. This is a step which I feel can rather weaken the potential enrichment of scholarship. History depends on clear and firm positions being taken by scholars.
The opposition which was organised and engendered by Pope Pius X against modernism is somewhat legendary and it would be impossible to enter into a detailed historical discussion here. Another important aspect of this Pope was his dealing with the massive popularity of working-class revolutions against capitalism. In fact, he instigated reforms within the Church which took on the international socialist uprisings of the time and created radical divergences within this same class, and thus diminished the tremendous force of early socialism.
The condemning of Socialism, of Modernism and of Relativism was fundamental to the politics of this Pope. He even established a 20th century inquisition: the famous or infamous Sodalitium Pianum, led by the clerical 'Beria', Umberto Benigni.
The Lamentabili Sane Exitu (1907) decree, together with the Pascendi Dominici Gregi encyclical, condemned any aspect of Modernism and this led to the Sacrorum Antistitum Oath imposed against the developments of the whole 20th century. This means that anyone who did not obey the Church had to face excommunication. This Pope was also a pilaster against the separation of Church and state. In fact, there were even cases of priests being excommunicated from the Church for daring to recognise the lay states of France, Portugal, Poland and other countries. The politics of the interdict was one of the most powerful tools of this Pope.
Dr Camilleri showed how Dun Karm strongly believed in the values propagated by Pope Pius X. Moreover, he convincingly showed that the thoughts of Dun Karm were already formulated, even from before, by these ultra-conservative beliefs and so his role as both a poet and a 'politician' found a comfortable position under this Pope, without any sign of turbulences or contradictions.
Future research also has to deepen the study on the relationship between Dun Karm (1871-1961) and Lord Strickland (1861-1940), the then Prime Minister of Malta, who also had to face huge tensions because of his principles for the modernisation and secularisation of Malta. Lord Strickland and Dun Karm were contemporaries. In the spirit of Pius X, Strickland had the interdict used against him and was also threatened by an attempt on his life, something which was repeated in the 1960s against the Labour movement.
Other contemporaries of Dun Karm were Manwel Dimech (1860-1921) and Juann Mamo (1886-1941). At the same time, when the latter published Ulied In-Nanna Venut fl-Amerika (1930), Dun Karm was engendering a dangerous idealisation of conservative passivity. In fact, aside from other things, I interpret the work of Mamo as an alternative - even a revolutionary one - against the artistic-political values of Dun Karm, the Caruana Dingli brothers and the entire artistic elite controlled by clerical and conservative values.
Dr Camilleri very interestingly concentrated on the year 1913, the year that Jean-Michel Rabaté elucidates as the decisive year for Modernism, and justly merged Dun Karm with both the historic International Eucharistic Congress and the monument by Antonio Sciortino known as Christ the King. As correctly stated by Camilleri, this monument was supposed to be entitled Heart of Jesus. However, here Dun Karm was portrayed introvertly and without much information on the historical context of this event.
We cannot forget that, only a few months after this momentous 1913 event, the First World War erupted. And it did not erupt unannounced. In 1913, there were already great tensions that were preparing the world for the greatest phenomenal atrocities of 1914, atrocities which, up until then, history had never even fathomed.
However, the year 1913 was concentrated with events which radically altered history and the historic evolution of human civilisation. It is obviously impossible to enter into an analysis on this point in an article, but there is a need to remember examples such as Marcel Duchamp's (1887-1968) exhibition of Nude Descending a Staircase at the Armory Show which caused an international scandal. The sculptures of Umberto Boccioni (1882-1916), Alexander Archipenko (1887-1964) and Jacob Epstein (1880-1959) overturned all traditional thoughts on this medium and the paintings of Robert Delaunay (1885-1941) provoked a new creative methodology.
The Futurist magazine Lacerba, together with the Manifest Futuriste de la Luxure, established nihilist revolutionary principles. Pablo Picasso (1881-1973), Georges Braque (1882-1963), Francis Picabia (1879-1953), Marcel Duchamp, Constantin Brancusi (1876-1957) and Henri Matisse (1869-1954) - all contemporaries of Dun Karm - created a whole new world of thought and creative praxis. Guillaume Apollinaire attacked the art of poetry with his Alcools Poèmes.
At the same time there is Rodin, a leading mentor of Sciortino, in London to seek out a location for his Burghers of Calais. The infamous scandal of The Rite of Spring by Igor Stravinsky, with costumes by Nikolai Roerich (1874-1947) and choreography by Vaslav Nijinsky (1890-1950) invaded the whole world with its unparalleled strength. Music, dance and design all changed their language - and all this was occurring contemporaneously to Dun Karm's time.
Simultaneously, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti announced his manifesto Parole-in-Liberta and Luigi Russolo created the Art of Noise; sound and noise became an integral part of artistic categories; the first wireless signal was sent from the Eiffel Tower and Roland Garros crossed the European Mediterranean to the Maghreb coast by air for the first time in history. And the opera Victory Over the Sun by Aleksei Kruchenykh (1886-1968), Mikhail Matyushin (1861-1934) and Kazimir Malevich (1878-1935) represented the victory of man over nature, over the universe, over the cosmos.
As said by Jon Wood, many are the particular years which fall under the eyes of the scholar because they are infused with moments which, like earthquakes and tsunamis, changed the entire evolution of humanity. 1913 is one of these momentous years. I myself focused on the year 1936, a year of modernism and tragedy, for my most recent publication Shostakovich, Britten, Stravinsky and the Painters in between: 1936.
Apart from the list I have elucidated above, one cannot forget that 1913 gave birth to the genius work of Marcel Proust (1871-1922), another contemporary of Dun Karm, and the work Totem and Taboo by Sigmund Freud (1856-1939). The language of Cubo-Futurism exploded in the same year. The idea of 'simultaneity' found roots in important soil. It reflected the relativist philosophy, which was harshly attacked by the dogma of Pius X. Thoughts on history/time and space began to find radically new interpretations and radically different ones, especially under the philosophical writings of Henri Bergson (1859-1941) Time and Free Will (1896) and Creative Evolution (1907). As asserted by Rabatè, the year 1913 was a frontier year: the death of order and the beginning of an era. It propagated a focus on the new and on experimental form, a new way of how to look at the present with all these radical industrial and technological changes occurring. These began to determine strange and unfamiliar manners of how one must represent and manifest this new life; complex, globalised and absolutely uncertain. These were all necessary ingredients for the international conflict that erupted in 1914.
Dun Karm and the Christ the King Monument are to be observed through this complex lens with all its tensions and paradoxes. To separate them from their socio-political context and to place them in a bubble would be to return to the conservative ideas within which Dun Karm was studied in the 1960s. In that decade began a vital process of 'deconstructing' the work of Dun Karm and others. One had to strip Dun Karm of his Benjaminian aura of artistry divorced from its historical and social reality. It was an extremely important process. However, now one must begin to reconstruct Dun Karm, not to interpret him according to his pre-1960s years but to place him on a new level, one which is qualitatively new.
Modernism also signified a dramatic scientific revolution which, like art, had to alter its fixed categories to attain new meaning (Einstein, Bohr, Heisenberg). The atom was attacked as was the sun and nature by Malevich. The atom did not remain indivisible as the Greeks used to think, and Icarus managed to approach the sun. Electric power was no longer a miracle but became a phenomenon which could be studied and controlled. Nature became something which could be occupied and exploited. Modernism created the Superman and, at the same time, Frankenstein's monster.
The same Modernism opened up all the paths to equality for diverse civilisations with their corresponding annihilation and genocide culture. Truth was no longer a Western monopoly. It actually became as divisible as the view through a crystal prism. Religions lost their absolute authority and had to eventually accept pluralistic truth. Democracies, rights, equalities, respect between each idea, of each idea. Technologically advanced global urbanisation under the laws of the capitalist market established a singular world with intellectual plurality. This was modernism. And within such context one finds Dun Karm and, as well as others, Caruana Dingli.
This coming Friday, 17 April, I will be giving a public talk on Dun Karm and his artistic/ideological relationship with Caruana Dingli, on how both artists conveyed their belief of ideal beauty and the tensions of politics and identity which are reflected in their work. The talk will be held at Europe House in St Paul's Street, Valletta, at 6 pm and will be delivered in Maltese. This event is a joint collaboration between the Department of Maltese, L-Akkademija tal-Malti and the Department of History of Art at the University of Malta.
Article edited and translated by Nikki Petroni