The Italianist, 35. 3, 453–473, October 2015
‘FORSE SUCCEDE SEMPRE COSÌ QUANDO SI
SCRIVE’: SELF-REFLECTION BETWEEN
POSTMODERNISM AND FEMINISM IN LAURA
PARIANI’S WRITING
GIGLIOLA SULIS
University of Leeds, UK
Based on the analysis of an excerpt from the last chapter of L’uovo di Gertrudina
(2003), this article investigates the forms, themes, and functions of self-reflection
in Laura Pariani’s fiction. It looks at its meta-fictional features (illusion-breaking
devices highlighting the constructed nature of fiction as an artifice: deconstructed
frames, non-linear narrations, juxtaposition and intertwining of several stories, multiple focalizations, narrative embeddings, multilingualism, and intertextuality), its
self-reflexive traits (reflection of the authorial self in the text, in a character with
deliberate autobiographical resonances), and the meta-narrative aspects (the
female narrator’s pondering on the act of narrating, its processes, its aims). It
shows how Pariani uses textual and narrative strategies such as those included
under the umbrella-term of self-reflection (typical of postmodern literature, although
not exclusive to it), and how, at the same time, her literary project is marked by a
strong ethical stance: ‘a moral agenda in postmodern disguise’. Irony is discarded,
in favour of a renewed trust in the ethical dimension of the act of writing, in the
role of the storyteller, and in an empathic narrative pact with the reader. Finally, Pariani’s ethics of self-reflection is discussed as an example of the common ground existing between postmodernism and feminisms, allied in the rejection of hegemonic
master narratives and in the choice of plural, partial, and minor narratives.
KEYWORDS: self-reflection, metanarrative, metafiction, feminism(s), postmodernism,
ethics, empathy, impegno, Laura Pariani, L’uovo di Gertrudina
Mi perdo nel passato; smarrisco anni, secoli. Mi ritrovo con Assunta quindicenne
che, nell’età in cui ci si prefigura la vita futura e la propria morte, legge su un
vecchio libro di devozioni come la Beata Mariana de Predes si rinchiuse volontariamente per tutta la vita nella sua stanza dove, tra due candele accese, aveva posto
un catafalco con uno scheletro di legno, davanti al quale passava il tempo meditando sulla morte. Succede proprio mentre, dalla sua cornice di ardesia, la foto
scattata in piazza Duomo nel mio quarto compleanno mi rimanda il viso della
bambina che sento di essere ancora qualche volta, quando avverto i mondi di
tutte le possibili storie girarmi intorno: con le vergini combattive delle favole di
mia nonna, il segreto della Missione salesiana nell’isola Dawson, le mani che si
© Italian Studies at the Universities of Cambridge,
Leeds and Reading 2015
DOI 10.1179/0261434015Z.000000000135
454
GIGLIOLA SULIS
aggrappano a un soggolo che toglie il respiro ne La monaca forzata di Mosè
Bianchi, il Seicento manzoniano in cui qualcuno spasima sul serio e non per le
solite schermaglie amorose di Filli … E allora nel cuore i nomi mi si mescolano,
i tempi s’incrociano: apriti sesamo, chiuditi sesamo … Ché mi pare che tutti i personaggi siano racchiusi nella stessa storia, la mia, e che, senza che davvero me ne
rendessi conto, episodi intimi da conservare sigillosamente nel chiuso delle mie
fantasie o dei miei rimorsi siano passati sulla bocca di tutti, diventando interpretazioni di altri, pagine di libri.
Forse succede sempre così quando si scrive: una monaca che apre la ferrata di un
convento di Monza può diventare di volta in volta una sventurata che risponde, o
una Salesiana appassionata che riflette sulla vanità delle parole, o una mezzadonna che, nel buio di una foresta che si sta mangiando il mondo, prega il Santissimo Arcangelo di liberarla dalla sua carne. Forse succede sempre così anche
quando si legge: ché da qualche altra parte, in un altro tempo, qualcuno racconterà una storia che ha a che fare intimamente con noi, qualcosa che riguarda la
polvere che siamo, il nostro niente che reclama amore; qualcosa che teniamo
chiuso nella memoria e mai daremmo in pasto agli altri. Ma il meccanismo del
vivere, per cui una parte di noi trascorre in altre vite, come le case in cui
abbiamo vissuto e che ora occupano altri, finestre in cui ci siamo affacciati e
dalle quali adesso uno sconosciuto guarda lo stesso paesaggio, frasi che
abbiamo pensato amato scritto e che diventano pensieri di chi li leggerà; l’é
tua, l’é mia, l’é morta l’umbrìa … Uno nessuno e centomila, siamo per gli altri
qualcuno non meno inventato di un personaggio secondario di un libro sconosciuto, una comparsa nel film della vita altrui. Ojalá te abras, ojalá te cierres.
Con ritmi stravolti, con gesti deformati, nel multiverso che si agita intorno a
me, Candelaria può tramutarsi in rondine fuggendo di là dal mare; nel quadro
di Francesco Guardi, Il parlatorio delle monache, Antonia si dà agli spassi
davanti a un teatrino di gioppini, io mi metto a giocare nel giardino di palazzo
Marliani con la mia levriera; e Gertrudina tiene in bilico tra le mani l’uovo primordiale, origine di tutte le galline.
Ché davvero ogni storia questa sera sembra avvenire nello stesso istante: Antonia
dalla finestra di palazzo Pusterla sta ascoltando il canto di un canarino che parla
di rose in giardini fioriti quando il vento di primavera soffia dolcemente; Virginia
Galilei, perduta nel profumo ardente del gelsomino, monta a cavallo di un unicorno; Gertrude chiude in una cassetta di legno le tristi bambole-monache della
sua infanzia, mentre con cuore intenerito pensa allo sguardo del giovane
paggio, e non è ancora venuto il tempo che converse mormorino e che a una di
loro scappi detta una frase di troppo e finisca sotterrata in un pozzo. E nel contempo io, dall’altra parte del mare, di ritorno dal Fin del Mundo cammino in
una calda notte cilena, triste di non aver ancora raccontato a nessuno la storia
di suor Assunta: sotto la luce di un fiume di stelle a illuminare, a un passo dal
palazzo della Moneda, il barrio Brasil abbandonato, facendo risaltare le facciate
liberty rovinate, le tegole stinte, i colori delle vetrate sfondate, le tristi erbacce del
selciato. Ma, all’imprevista, un uccellino si mette a cantare sfiorando con estrema
tenerezza una fontana vuota d’acqua, al centro di una piazzetta circolare, raccontando di altri tempi, de antes, quando queste case erano ancora vive ….1
FORSE SUCCEDE SEMPRE COSÌ QUANDO SI SCRIVE
455
The definition of metafictional novels that Patricia Waugh proposed in a seminal
study is well suited to Laura Pariani’s works: ‘Metafictional novels tend to be constructed on a principle of fundamental and sustained opposition: the construction of
a fictional illusion (as in traditional realism) and the laying bare of that illusion’.2
Constructed at every level on principles of fragmentation, plurality and marginality,
and therefore characterized by non-naturalistic strategies, Pariani’s writings insist on
the thematization of writing processes and on the detailed representation of the contexts in which stories are created and transmitted. In a growing progression over
time, the obsessive recurrence of a nucleus of metanarrative reflections can be perceived in her work. From La Signora dei porci (1999) onwards, these reflections,
variously scattered in her texts, are often united around a figure vaguely presented
as Pariani’s alter ego. The reflection of the writer in a textual person is not marked by
a mechanical autobiographism, but rather brings to mind the game of broken
mirrors. It is an anonymous ‘Scrittrice’ (authorial upper-case letter) in La Signora
dei porci, where the narrative voice is rather associated with the ‘Mietitore’
(death), or the interviewer ‘sciura Laura’, a Lombard writer who is interested ‘alle
tradizioni, le leggende della montagna, le storie di una volta’, in La valle delle
donne lupo (2011).3 Moreover, with an overturning of gender, in Questo viaggio
chiamavamo amore (2015) it is the doctor Carlo Pariani who transcribes the story
of the patient Dino Campana.4 The authorial alter ego can appear as a character distinct from the narrator (as in La Signora or in Quando Dio ballava il tango, 2002),
or embodying the narrating voice, as in L’uovo di Gertrudina (2003), which will be
analysed here, or in La straduzione (2004).
Novels and short stories tend to draw upon some facts about the author, like her
age (born in 1951) and some life experiences to which fundamental value is
ascribed.5 Her trips to Argentina (and especially one in 1966 with her mother,
looking for her grandfather who had emigrated in the twenties and never returned)
testify to the rhizomatic rootedness of her personal and family history, in its oscillation between Northern Italy and South America. Childhood places such as
Busto Arsizio and Magnago (north of Milan) alternate with the village of Orta
San Giulio and the province of modern-day Novara, where she is now based, as
well as with Buenos Aires and the region of Patagonia. On a structural level, the
authorial double first interrupts the plots, and then connects their fragments with
her presence; thematically, she reflects on the mechanisms of writing and storytelling, on their meaning, ending, and limits. With a process of mise en abyme, many
of the characters (women, above all), act as second-degree narrators, either in the
first person or mediated in the free indirect speech of the narrator. Two examples
among many are Cora and Catterina in the feminine and family-based genealogy
of storytellers in Quando Dio ballava il tango: they comment on both their own
storytelling and that of others, on writing, on listening, and on reading, while
often embedding other stories within the main one.6 Also, the fact that the language
of both narrators and characters tends to be a mixture of Italian, dialects, Spanish
and other foreign languages has a double value. On the one hand, the autobiographical resonances are evident; on the other multilingualism contributes to the antiillusionist strategy: by complicating the understanding of the linguistic code, it
reveals the non-transparency of language under a metalinguistic perspective, thus
underlining the unnaturalness of communication.7
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GIGLIOLA SULIS
While all of these elements break the realist illusion of the story told and emphasize its being an artificial construction in a non-naturalist perspective, they simultaneously heighten the reality effect of the act of storytelling and strengthen
overall its aesthetic illusion and its claim for authenticity. The reader recognizes,
at the margins and in the textual interstices, the invariants of the different incarnations of the writer-character, who is then projected back outside the text onto the
figure of the author.8 The reader shares with the writer the intellectual complicity
in the deciphering of textual constructedness (part of the postmodern game of overturning the traditional expectations of the reader of fiction), but s/he also develops
an empathic trust in the ethical project of the storyteller, and in the truth content of
the authorial macrotext. Birgit Neumann summarized well how some types of selfreflection (here, metanarratives) proceed in diverse directions, both exposing the
artificiality of the narrated story and strengthening the ‘illusion of authenticity’ of
the narrative act:
Metanarrative passages need not destroy aesthetic illusion (Wolf → Illusion (Aesthetic) [1]), but may also contribute to substantiating the illusion of authenticity
that a narrative seeks to create. It is precisely the concept of narratorial illusionism, suggesting the presence of a speaker or narrator, that illustrates that metanarrative expressions can serve to create a different type of naturalisation, vis. what
Fludernik (1996: 341) has called the frame of storytelling.9
As we will see later on, Pariani narrativizes the thoughts and anxieties of the
character-writer – an authorial double in turn mirrored and refracted in the narrating characters, readers, and listeners to stories. At the same time, through her metanarrative comments she highlights the ethical dimension of narration, in primis the
empathic identification of the narrator with the narrated characters. The selfreflexive dimension of the text contributes to the creation of a relationship with
the reader in which the ethical stance is not put aside, but rather modulated in postmodern fashion. A narrative pact is established, marked by solidarity within a community that includes the narrated characters, the narrative voice(s), the female
author, and readers.
To highlight how Laura Pariani constructs her ‘moral agenda […] in postmodern
disguise’,10 this article investigates the intertwining of different traits associated with
self-reflection in her work. Without aiming for an exact taxonomy of the phenomena and without entering into the terminological debate, the following pages will
follow the distinction made by Ansgar Nünning between ‘metafiction’ and
‘metanarration’:
metafiction radically undermines our notions of stable realities, metanarration
confines itself to thematising and reflecting upon narrative processes and structures. And where metafiction always works against illusion, metanarration
works both against, and contributes to the building of illusion. 11
Nünning singles out moreover four basic aspects of metanarrative: formal (where
the metanarrative aspect is situated in the text, between diegesis, intradiegesis, extradiegesis, paratext); structural (the quantitative and qualitative relationship with the
FORSE SUCCEDE SEMPRE COSÌ QUANDO SI SCRIVE
457
rest of the text); relative to the content (what the metanarrative commentaries refer
to); and orientated to reception (their function).12
Using a metonymical approach, my reflection starts with the analysis of an
excerpt taken from the end of L’uovo di Gertrudina,13 extending the suggestions
emerging from this text, when appropriate, to other pages of the collection and
other works by Pariani. My study brings together the practice of close reading
with the Italian stylistic tradition of curare de minimis – in Gianfranco Contini’s
words: ‘auscultazione molto attenta della superficie del testo’.14 This approach is
inspired by the empathic relation between author, story, and reader suggested by
Pariani’s work. It also follows the invitation extended by the editor of this volume
to reassert the centrality of the text in a historical moment that seems to privilege
the ‘distant gaze’ towards literary matters.15 Quantitative methods have seemed
to predominate in the United States from the end of the 1970s, in polemical relation
to the school of New Criticism. In the periodic oscillations of critical tendencies,16
towards the end of the 2000s this methodological turn bore fruit in Italy too, as
the stimulating maps and graphics of the Atlante della letteratura italiana show.17
Yet, against the ‘background assumption […] that ‘close reading’, like the aesthetic,
can only be thought through in what are ultimately idealist terms’, one can still
assert that ‘another kind of aesthetic is possible’.18
Finally, my article follows Werner Wolf’s proposal to recognize in self-reflection
an ensemble of features that characterize narrative fiction as a genre, from its beginnings, but that are combined with diverse consistency and articulated with different
frequencies, modalities, and functions in various epochs, literary currents, and single
authors.19 The pages that follow reflect on how Pariani inflects a series of narrative
strategies such as those enclosed under the umbrella term of self-reflection – not
exclusive to, but certainly typical of postmodern literature – and how, at the same
time, her literary project’s strong ethical imprint reconfigures these same strategies.
In Pariani’s work, irony and disbelief are discarded, and the emphasis is instead on a
renewed but not ingenuous trust in the ethical dimension of the act of writing, in the
role of the storyteller, and in a narrative pact with the reader marked by empathy.
After a section dedicated to the analysis of the proposed excerpt, the concluding
section of this article will investigated the self-reflexive attitude of Laura Pariani
as an example of the conflict between postmodern lack of belief in master narratives
and the feminist desire of finding, in the interstices of History, fragmented and plural
narratives, a minore, alternative to the hegemonic ones. In this way, this article
wishes to contribute to the reconsideration and widening of the account of the
Italian postmodern, which critics have sometimes restricted to aspects of irony,
lack of commitment, and detachment from reality.
SELF-REFLEXIVE
FORMS AND THEMES IN
‘L’UOVO DI GERTRUDINA’
The passage cited above, taken from the sixth and final chapter of the eponymous
collection, L’uovo di Gertrudina, gathers the metanarrative threads scattered
throughout the five previous chapters and weaves them into a final tapestry,
giving them new meaning. The fact that the chapter and the collection share a
title is the first clue of the metafictional game: a part in the all, a part for the
whole, ‘L’uovo di Gertrudina’ is the whole book in essence, and, as is revealed in
the end, is the key to reading it. United by narrating the lives of women who have
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GIGLIOLA SULIS
chosen or were forced to take the veil, the chapters of L’uovo di Gertrudina are
different stories, in time (from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries to a dystopian future), in place (from Piedmont and Lombardy to Tuscany and South America)
and in their protagonists (respectively: Suor Assunta, Antonia Pusterla/Suor Carla
Francesca, Suor Alice, Virginia Galilei/Suor Maria Celeste, and Suor Tránsito with
Candelaria; in Chapter 6, the young nun at the gallows in a folktale and the Gertrudina of the title, inspired by the Manzonian Gertrude). The first and last chapters,
however, spotlight another female figure, the female writer-storyteller, and encapsulate the previous five stories in a deconstructed self-reflexive frame. As a result, what
initially appeared to be a collection of stories united by a common theme, in the end
could be read as an extreme case of deconstruction of the novel form, in line with a
postmodern sensibility which has lost faith in linear, all-encompassing narration.
Since her literary debut in the early 1990s, the short story seems to be the most congenial narrative form for Pariani, and the distinction between the (fragmented) novel
and the interweaving of short stories is so feeble as to become useless.20
The first chapter of L’uovo di Gertrudina, ‘Il colore del silenzio’, is devoted to
Suor Assunta. Born in the province of Novara, she was a volunteer with the Salesians in the Tierra del Fuego and Dawson Island. She returned to Piedmont in the
1940s and died in 1963, after a 10-year vow of silence. However, a large part of
the text is occupied with the first-person narrative voice, who writes about her
journey between Piedmont and Patagonia in search of witnesses and documents
to reconstruct the character, with other embedded Argentine stories. Therefore,
the reader explores not just Suor Assunta’s story, but also that of the
writer-character’s journey in search the traces of her existence. The chapter is structured in paragraphs of varying length, and the weak chronological progression of
the two levels (those of Suor Assunta and of the writer) is altered by prolepsis and
analepsis, with jumps forwards and backwards in space and in time, and different
focalizations and points of view. In Chapters 2 to 5, the not predetermined multiplicity of narrative voices structurally reiterates the rejection of the naturalistic illusion: the story is entrusted to multiple female narrators in ‘Se tu ti formi rosa’, and to
an external, omniscient narrator, but strongly focalized on different protagonists, in
‘La voladora’, ‘Per maggiormente regalarla’, and ‘Arcangeli di fumo’. The final
chapter, ‘L’uovo di Gertrudina’, is an eight-page-long declaration of poetics. At
the end of the book, the narrative voice and her act of intense narrative crafting
come to the forefront, while the previously told stories are subsumed as pieces of
a new mosaic (the frame story).
In a discourse proceeding here too in a zig-zag of juxtapositions, interruptions and
jumps, a coherent and explicit metanarrative reflection on the how and why of storytelling emerges, pivoting on a few points which I will list here before analysing them
in detail: (a) the narrator’s empathic identification with her characters, who represent a marginal female community in which each woman is mirrored and identified in the other, thanks to the co-existence of lives, times, and places made
possible by the art of storytelling; (b) the ample intertextuality, including the
relationship between spoken and written language, and between high and popular
culture; (c) the resistance of reality to being told, and the circularity of reading,
writing, and life; (d) the ethical and salvific dimension of storytelling, in preserving
the memories of the forgotten and in creating alternative realities and imaginary
spaces of freedom for the female narrators and their characters (and, as a result,
FORSE SUCCEDE SEMPRE COSÌ QUANDO SI SCRIVE
459
urgency, desire, and obsession becoming the driving forces of writing); (e) the physical pleasure associated with the voice and singing beyond the rationality of the
written word, and the materiality of storytelling.
‘CHÉ MI PARE CHE TUTTI I PERSONAGGI SIANO RACCHIUSI NELLA STESSA STORIA, LA
MIA’
In the opening of the extract, the narrating voice spotlights herself and her identification with the protagonists of the stories, with an abundance of first person pronouns and possessive adjectives. ‘Mi perdo nel passato; smarrisco anni, secoli. Mi
ritrovo con Assunta quindicenne’, she writes. She also finds herself together with
the ‘vergini combattive dei racconti di mia nonna’, with the Gertrude of Monza,
and with an image of herself as a child frozen in a framed picture: ‘il viso della
bambina che sento ancora di essere qualche volta’. At the end of the excerpt, the
identification is still between the nuns (in order: Candelaria, Antonia, Virginia, Gertrude) and a first-person narrator now in synchrony with the time of writing, who
‘nel contempo’, ‘dall’altra parte del mare’, ‘cammin[a] in una calda notte cilena’,
and thinks about the story Suor Assunta and how to tell it. Nullifying spatiotemporal and interpersonal distance, storytelling allows for the co-existence of
places, times, and stories: ‘i nomi si mescolano, i tempi si incrociano’, and ‘ogni
storia questa sera sembra avvenire nello stesso istante’.21 Marked in the final
chapter by the popular magical incantations of ‘apriti sesamo, chiuditi sesamo
[…]’, ‘[o]jalá te abras, ojalá te cierres’, the narrative opens and closes the fragments
of narrated life, in search of both their uniqueness and the points of connection and
overlapping.
The female writer incarnates and becomes the spokesperson for a community
which shares gender and the pain of existence,22 and which leads from the
‘vergini combattive della favole [della] nonna’ towards the nuns she recounts in
her writing. Through this process of plural identification, the reflection of the
authorial self in the text is just not an autobiographical double – a distancing that
objectifies the self as the Other, making it into a narratable character – but also
an element that justifies the connection between the parts, the relationship
between the different characters (and their stories) and the voice which revives
and narrates them: je est un autre, as in the title of Philippe Lejeune, turns into je
suis les autres et les autres sont moi.23 In so doing, Pariani’s fiction internalizes
the opposition between the pre-modern storyteller and the twentieth-century novelist theorized by Walter Benjamin. While she projects on the text a twentieth-century
individual female novelist, with her neuroses and anxieties, she idealizes instead the
figure of the storyteller she aspires to be: an artisan of stories, the voice and
interpreter of a community, who welcomes the experience in herself to transform
it into a meaningful narrative for the benefit of others.24
‘QUANDO
SI SCRIVE’, ‘QUANDO SI LEGGE’
The excerpt above lists and reviews the sources of storytelling, whether biographical
or literary, written or spoken, erudite or popular, textual or visual. The oral fairy
tales of childhood are mentioned, together with scholarly texts (the Pirandellian
‘uno, nessuno e centomila’ and the ‘Seicento manzoniano’), and the suggestions
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GIGLIOLA SULIS
of Francesco Guardi’s and Mosè Bianchi’s paintings (with a detail in the painting
that comes alive and becomes a story: ‘le mani che si aggrappano a un soggolo
che toglie il respiro’). The intertextual network of L’uovo di Gertrudina is wide
and composite, and ranges across highbrow and lowbrow culture, in a postmodern
vein. The entire collection is interwoven with quotations from sacred texts (Ecclesiastes) and world literature (from Herman Melville to Lewis Carroll, from Dante
to George Bernanos), but punctuating it and marking its rhythm are, above all,
the extended quotations from songs: songs in Italian (e.g. Il mare by Sergio Bruni)
and in dialect (among many: the Piedmontese Prinsi Raimund munta a caval and
the Lombard Amore inevitabile, here Se tu ti formi rosa), lullabies (Nina nana
bobo, Cavallino arrò arrò), and prayers (Salve Regina, the praises to the Santissimi
Arcangeli). The folk dimension is well-represented: in the analysed passage there is
the Lombard saying ‘l’é tua, l’é mia, l’é morta l’umbrìa’, and the fairytale quote
‘apriti sesamo, chiuditi sesamo’, reprised in the Spanish ‘[o]jalá te abras, ojalá te
cierres’. Nevertheless, here the dialect words and the folk tales are passed from an
oral and instinctive storyteller, the ‘nonna illetterata’, to the granddaughter, now a
literate and self-aware narrator.25 Their reuse in her fiction becomes part of a hyperliterary strategy that combines the plurality of cultural references with a refined style
(e.g. the composite lexicon veined with multilingualism and multiform syntax) and
articulated textual structures.26
‘COME
LE CASE IN CUI ABBIAMO VISSUTO E CHE ORA OCCUPANO ALTRI’
The photo of the writer as a girl, which is mentioned together with the paintings,
adds an extra-literary dimension to the question of sources, and leads to the relation
of writing to life. In the first chapter of the volume, writing is presented as wrestling
with a reality that shuns the writer’s ambition of faithfulness and gives itself over
only to transfigurations and reinventions.
Ché sono tanti anni che giro intorno a questa storia. […] Ci ho provato spesso,
cercando di essere fedele alle notizie ricostruite, disponendo gli episodi della
vita di Suor Assunta con un certo ordine: ma non riuscivo a ottenere niente di
‘vivo’. O forse succede sempre così: la realtà resiste a farsi raccontare, il linguaggio scritto non può resuscitarla. L’unica cosa che uno scrittore può fare è, paradossalmente, trasfigurarla, reinventarla. (p. 20)
In a circular repetition of key-concepts, the first part of the sentence, ‘forse succede
sempre così: la realtà resiste sempre di farsi raccontare’, is reprised twice in the final
pages: ‘[f]orse succede sempre così quando si scrive’ and ‘[f]orse succede sempre così
quando si legge’. Introducing the ‘scrivere’ / ‘leggere’ variations in the anaphoric tricolon suggests both the reflection and reciprocal nourishment between reading and
writing, and the circularity of reading, writing, and life. In the initial lines of the
excerpt, when 15-year-old Assunta foresees in a book of devotions her future
choice of silence and meditation, it is reading which inspires life. Similarly, every
reader is awaited ‘da qualche altra parte, in qualche altro tempo’ by ‘una storia
che ha a che fare intimamente con noi’, and the secrets ‘sigillosamente’ kept in
the memory of the writer pass ‘sulla bocca di tutti, diventando interpretazioni di
altri, pagine di libri’. Linked to this circularity are reflections on the ‘meccanismo
FORSE SUCCEDE SEMPRE COSÌ QUANDO SI SCRIVE
461
del vivere, per cui una parte di noi trascorre in altre vite, come le case in cui abbiamo
vissuto e che ora occupano altri’. Writing not only doubles and feeds life, then, but
lives themselves are reduced to stories, assembled differently according to the point
of view of the narrator-protagonist, in a kaleidoscope where everyone is ‘un personaggio secondario di un libro sconosciuto, una comparsa nel film della vita altrui’.
In the central section of the excerpt (between ‘quando si legge’ and ‘ojalá te cierres’),
the opposition of ‘sé’ vs. ‘altro’ is replaced by a plural ‘we’ – a collective ‘self’, containing both ‘I’ and the ‘others’, that returns in the final page of the book to represent the literary victory of ‘us’ (the community of oppressed women) against the
oppressors (p. 220). Protagonists, second leads, and secondary characters, real or
imagined, exchange roles. Lives are rewritten, the centrality of individual events
becomes relative, and we all recognize each other in our sameness and otherness,
as in the unknown person who, standing by what was once our window, ‘guarda
ora lo stesso paesaggio’.
‘TRAMUTARSI
IN RONDINE FUGGENDO DI LÀ DAL MARE’
The power of storytelling to preserve memory is very evident in the excerpt. The
night-time walk in the barrio Brasil in Santiago demonstrates how places, people,
and their stories are subject to the wear of time and to oblivion (one notes the
sequence of adjectives: ‘abbandonato’, ‘rovinate’, ‘stinte’, ‘sfondate’, ‘tristi’,
‘vuota’), but it also entrusts storytelling with the task of slowing their decline.
Here the ‘barrio Brasil abbandonato’ is brought back to life, ‘all’imprevista’, by
the story-song of a little bird. Similarly, L’uovo di Gertrudina redeems and brings
back to life the nuns of the book (the epitome of the weak, the defeated, the forgotten
by history), thanks to the immortalizing quality of memory and storytelling. Given
the high mission assigned to literature, the mediator between life and death, memory
and oblivion, it is not surprising that the driving force of the act of narrating, from
the very first chapter, is identified in the desire-urgency-obsession triad: ‘[s]crivere
una storia ha a che vedere con il caso, ma soprattutto con il desiderio: è la sua
urgenza – direi quasi ossessione – che ti spinge ad andare avanti’ (p. 46).27 With
writing being presented as a fight against death, through an unpredictable balance
between testimony and invention, its interruption is therefore experienced as suffering (‘Ché ogni interruzione del lavoro è una pena, ho fretta di tornare a Gertrudina’,
p. 216) and silences or delays are marked by sadness, for example ‘di non aver
ancora raccontato a nessuno la storia di Suor Assunta’. The writer is represented
as beset by the infinite possibilities of storytelling, taken in by the phantasmagoria
of the ‘mondi di tutte le possibili storie’, ‘nel multiverso che si agita intorno’.
As well as protecting memories, storytelling has the power to open spaces of
freedom, unlike historical writing which is constrained by accuracy. At the intradiegetic level, Suor Alice, who resists torture by holding on to the memory of a childhood nursery rhyme, shows how words and sounds from memory can create a
respite and mental escape from a present filled with unavoidable pain (cf.
pp. 131–50 passim, and p. 215). At the diegetic level, in the conclusion, the authorial
voice proposes some rewritings of the stories told: in a fantastical turn, Virginia flies
on a unicorn while ‘Candelaria può tramutarsi in rondine fuggendo di là al mare’.28
Contrary to the general trend in Pariani’s writing, which tends to be elliptical and
reticent and invites the reader to read between the lines and the unspoken, L’uovo
462
GIGLIOLA SULIS
di Gertrudina closes with the all-too-explicit declaration of literature as a potential
‘gesto di libertà, di salvezza, perfino di redenzione’, which immortalizes the female
protagonists, ‘forzate and sconfitte’, in a ‘sguardo di sogno’, while ‘i principi padri e
i fratelli despoti, un tempo vincenti, ora sono schiacciati per l’eternità dalla luce del
nostro disprezzo’. Storytelling not only hands down experiences, but can even dramatically reverse their meanings: ‘Nel mondo di tutte le immaginazioni: apriti
sesamo’ (p. 220).29
‘IL
CANTO DI UN CANARINO CHE PARLA DI ROSE IN GIARDINI FIORITI’
Other metanarrative clues from the selected passage direct the attention towards the
physical pleasure of storytelling, associated with the joy of singing and the beauty of
the voice. On two occasions, birdsong symbolizes this joyful element of delight. For
Antonia, the canary ‘parla di rose in giardini fioriti’ (added emphasis) when singing,
thus recreating a reality of wellbeing opposed to the forced reclusion. For the writer,
in the frame story, ‘all’imprevista un uccellino si mette a cantare […] raccontando di
altri tempi, de antes, quando queste case erano ancora vive’ (added emphasis). A few
pages earlier, one of the apriti sesamo’s had led to a sequence of scenes in which the
protagonist nuns sing, followed by the narration of the grandmother’s oral storytelling when the narrator was a girl (pp. 214–15). Mentioning the pre-rational beauty
of songs and voices focuses the attention on the need for the narrator to find an inner
connection with her childhood self (‘la bambina che ancora sono’). The storyteller
complements the reason of the word-logos with the pleasure of the song-phoné,
which ‘proclama la legittimità del piacere di esistere’: ‘[p]erché la vita e l’anima ci
sono sempre vicine quando cantiamo, e i versi delle canzoni non sono più di
nessuno, escono dal nostro corpo che ci fa male’ (p. 215).30
Futhermore, many passages insist on the ‘materiality’ of voices and their appeal.
The ‘fragile’ and ‘glaciale’ voice of Suor Assunta, for example, is one of the triggers
that push the writer towards her journey to research and reconstruct the woman’s
story:
Questa sera mi basta rievocare la sua voce: l’ho sentita in una registrazione antidiluviana che agli inizi degli anni Cinquanta un ricercatore di storia orale raccolse
nel convento in cui lei trascorreva i suoi ultimi anni. Una di quelle voci che rimescolano e, ascoltate, non si dimenticano più: incredibilmente fragile e al contempo
glaciale. Come un cristallo di neve’. (p. 16)
This last quotation is also a good example of the fixed series of topoi in which
Pariani thematizes the contexts of oral and written storytelling. Writing usually
happens in the lonely ‘room of one’s own’.31 This is often represented as a silent
room where the writer stands by the window looking at the external world, in a
liminal position that also signifies her being at the border between the self and the
other. In other cases, the writer sits at her desk, in front of a computer, focused on
the task of recreating the world on a page. The time is the evening-night-dawn: an
interruption and pause from everyday life which is the ideal moment for writing
(cf. pp. 216, 79).32 For oral storytelling, the idealized locus is the family hearth by
which the female narrators sit and talk, such as ‘il portico che odorava del ribollire
di un pentolone di salsa di pomodo’, and before that ‘il cantone di una fumosa
FORSE SUCCEDE SEMPRE COSÌ QUANDO SI SCRIVE
463
cucina, [dove] una fantesca raccontava alla piccola Gertrude storie di monache’
(p. 215). There are abundant observations on the individual ways of telling
stories, such as the grandmother who ‘contava lentamente, girando la manovella
del passaverdura’ (p. 215), or Asunción who ‘[r]accontava lentamente […], con la
sapienza delle grandi narratrici. Cerco di rispettare il colore della sua voce’
(p. 75). Furthermore, the page which tells the stories is filled with objects which
transmit them: letters, diaries, books, notebooks, photocopies, documents, computers, video recorders, photographs. The emphasis on the tools of the writer thematizes within the story the work that goes into the text, and therefore highlights its
artificial constructedness. At the same time, these concrete objects are called to
testify with their concreteness the claim of truth, not so much of the stories told,
but of the act of storytelling as performed in the text and celebrated in the frame
story, thus increasing its reality effect.33
The reading performed thus far shows that ‘L’uovo di Gertrudina’ is a metafictional, metanarrative, and self-reflexive text. It shows its own artificiality in its division of the main story into several non-linear stories, in its wide intertextuality, and
multilingualism. Self-reflexivity is highlighted by the figure of the female writer, and
reinforced by the mise en abyme of the many female narrators: oral storytellers, such
as the narrator’s grandmother, or writers, such as Suor Tránsito who puts together
her memories or Suor Maria Celeste who composes a letter to her father. On the
basis of Nünning’s metanarrative parameters of form, structure, content, and function,34 from a formal point of view the metanarrative comments are situated mainly
in the diegesis, with the narrator speaking in first person. As often occurs, however,
the situation is more fluid than the categories used to describe it. On the one hand,
the narrator is a character among the others, and, on the other, the notes on ways
and forms of narration are not exclusively hers but are also expressed by the intradiegetic characters of narrators, readers, listeners, either in brief mentions or longer
forms. Under the book’s structural profile (quantitative), the metanarrative observations are in balance with the rest of the narration in the first chapter, present to
a lesser degree in the next, and become central in the final chapter, where they constitute the main focus. In terms of content, the specific issue of the modes and
meaning of storytelling is developed from a personal perspective by the narrator,
but is then taken to a higher level to represent the narrative processes tout court
(‘succede sempre così’; added emphasis). The functions of the metanarrative sections
are fundamentally ethical and empathic. Here the narrator is not the interpreter of
History, but is presented instead as a collector and transcriber of unwritten stories of
women.35 The authorial alter ego is invested with the task of preserving the memories of the multifaceted female community; as both a literate writer and heir to a
female line of producers and receivers of stories, she can fulfil her mission by bringing together the ancient art of storytelling and the most refined techniques of late
twentieth-century literary fiction. Outside the text, the mission of keeping
memory alive is projected onto the reader, who, responding to the personalized
voice of a biographically recognizable ‘teller’ (the character of the writer Laura) is
invited to feel empathy with the stories told and to share the writer’s ethical
project of storytelling.
Such a significant accumulation of self-reflexive features leads us to consider their
role in the definition of the poetics and ideology of Pariani, placed at the intersection
between belonging to the cultural and literary climate of the postmodern, which no
464
GIGLIOLA SULIS
longer permits linear or ingenuous narratives, and feminist engagement, which
requires the female narrator to find a gendered standpoint that would found a practice of action in the world.
AT
THE INTERSECTION OF POSTMODERNISM AND FEMINISM
It may be useful, at this point, to tie together the analysis of self-reflection in Laura
Pariani to the key points of some feminist theorizations. Such an operation is also
justified by the fact that Pariani was an active member of feminist collectives and
of politically antagonistic groups of the student movement during her formative
years spent as a university student in philosophy and history in Milan,36 one of
the liveliest cities of Italian counterculture in the first half of the 1970s.37 Beyond
the focus on the perspective of women and on the stories of the outcasts and
defeated, other elements in her works seem to relate to this context. Among them
is the concept of storytelling as a practice of relationship: in fact, it develops into
a narrative topos the collective sessions of the consciousness-raising groups, in
which life stories were shared and interpreted. It is not a question of narratives
marked by an intimist and subjective female withdrawal into oneself, but the first
step in understanding patriarchal structures ‘partendo da sé’, on the basis of the conviction that ‘the personal is political’.38 As Alessia Ronchetti summarizes,
[i]n termini generali, partire da sé significa legittimarsi in quanto soggetti del discorso sulla base di un sapere derivante dal proprio vissuto e dal proprio desiderio.
Intesa in tal senso, questa pratica lascia spesso visibili tracce nella produzione
femminista, dove grande rilievo acquistano ad esempio narrazione ed
autonarrazione.39
Another of the elements that have emerged in the preceding section is the delineation, in metanarrative commentaries and thematizations, of a phenomenology of
oral storytelling, in which the abstract rationality of the word-logos finds its
natural corporeal complement in the voice-phoné, thus incorporating pleasure as
a key element of the telling and sharing of stories: the ‘perfetto concerto tra voce
ed espressione del viso che si sviluppa nel canto e nelle narrazioni orali’ (p. 215).
In A più voci, a counter-history of the presence of the voice in Western culture,
Adriana Cavarero reminds us how the enjoyment provoked by listening and the fascination emanating from voices are connected to the feminine dimension all the way
back to Greek myths, with the Homeric representation of the enchanting song of the
sirens, and demonstrates how the bases of philosophy have been constructed on
their marginalization and repression (the sirens vs. Plato). If in Cavarero’s reflection
the sphere of relation is associated with vocality, this link is well-represented in Pariani’s works, both in the thematization of the contexts of female storytelling and in
the metanarrative comments. Pariani’s self-reflexive structures intensify the relational action of individuals who communicate with one another, reciprocally,
while remaining different and unique: a ‘mondo umano delle voci singolari e
plurali che, parlando, si comunicano l’una all’altra’.40 One should also look at
the cases in which the story is presented as part of a dialogue, which can happen
from afar, in the letters that Virginia writes to her father (pp. 158–70), or in
person, in ‘Se tu ti formi rosa’, whose paragraphs are 10 responses to the questions
FORSE SUCCEDE SEMPRE COSÌ QUANDO SI SCRIVE
465
(not transcribed) of the ‘Reverendo Padre’ who is investigating the murder of
Antonia. The dedication of the volume further strengthens the relational dimension
of storytelling, as a transmission of stories marked by sharing and emotion: ‘a tutti
coloro che, / raccontandomi storie, / hanno suscitato dentro me emozioni/spaventosamente impreviste’ (p. 7).
The interpretation of storytelling as a relational act and the question of the unique
individuals involved (both the narrator and the person who is object of narration)
can also inspire a Gramscian-feminist reading, following on the tracks of the postcolonial theorizations of Gayatri Spivak on female subalternity.41 From this perspective, the projection of the female author to the margins and interstices of the narrated
stories (but never at the centre) is not only part of the metafictional paradox of postmodern narrative as ‘narcissistic narrative’, i.e. texts that end up mirroring themselves and the processes of their creation.42 It also signals on a fictional level the
positionality of the narrating subject (the researcher as well as the writer) in relation
to the narrated subjects to whom she lends her voice and whose cause she espouses.
Spivak illuminates the impasse in which the (well-intentioned) intellectual finds
himself/herself when studying and narrating the feminine subaltern: even when
one takes a challenging or denunciatory position, his/her discourse necessarily develops within the parameters of the hegemonic culture, and proceeds by manipulations
and silencings of the Other. The sole only honest intellectual path in such a situation
is to present the research (and the story) as the result of an encounter. Against the
pretence of scientific objectivity, the specific social, cultural, economic, gendered
positioning of the researcher, writer, or storyteller is highlighted, because telling
about others is also always telling about oneself. Within the narrative texts of
Pariani, the autobiographical references of the double of the author function to
situate her in a precise social and individual position, thanks to which the emphatic
identification with the characters, in the simultaneity of their stories, spaces, and
times, happens in an identity that does not annul their differences. The strategies
of self-reflection put into play and exalt the preservation within the text of the
traces of otherness. ‘La mia è, naturalmente, una ricostruzione’, the female narrator
in the first chapter warns (p. 47). In its structures and contents, the story exposes its
being the result of processes of construction, and the ‘shadow zones’ and the ‘reticences’ are thematized and commented upon, thus emphasizing the resistance of
the Other to the direct transcription in the story and in writing: ‘Suor Assunta mi
affascina soprattutto per le zone d’ombra della sua vicenda, per le sue stesse reticenze’ (p. 27).
Beyond functioning as a link between the narrator and characters, and between
the female author and her stories, empathy is also the relation with the story told
to which the reader is enticed.43 As we have seen, many of Pariani’s works
present some sort of frame story, however de-structured and articulated in various
forms: sometimes it embeds or punctuates the story with a geometric exactness,
while in others it is deliberately inserted without precision. The frame simulates
within the text the function of a metanarrative paratext that would explain the circumstances and the reasons for writing. Beyond this, in its repetition within the
authorial macrotext, the frame composes a serial narrative of the character-writer,
well-known to the reader for the constancy and coherence of the biographical and
cultural references that refer to the extra-textual figure of the female author. According to Neumann, this ‘narratorial illusionism’, produces a different ‘type of
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GIGLIOLA SULIS
naturalisation’:44 self-reflection breaks the conventions of verisimilitude of the narrated stories (‘costruzioni’, which borrow the materials of lives and art to reinvent
them), but at the same time it strengthens the illusion of truth in the narrative act, the
claim of truth of the frame story, and the ethical position of the narrator. The female
writer, with her mission of saving those who are historically marginal and forgotten
from oblivion, invests herself with a high ethical status. The reader is called not only
to actively collaborate with the writer in the deciphering of the text, in the postmodern play of cross-references, but also to share with her the research of a gendered,
subaltern standpoint from which to observe and interpret the world. One can profitably extend to this narrative pact, the definition of ‘ethics of metanarration’ originally proposed for the works of the English writer Ian McEwan (rich in
characters-protagonists who are writers):
McEwan has always been a writer with a moral agenda, and his belief in empathy
and imagination as the building blocks of our moral system attest to this. What
makes McEwan’s case so interesting is that this moral agenda comes in postmodern disguise. […] in his novels the different ontological layers always remain
clearly identifiable and the boundaries between them stay intact. McEwan’s
model of empathy, the ‘narrative imagination’ […] is loaded with social and
moral responsibilities and has a clear moral function.45
The ‘ethics of metanarration’ is not in contradiction with Waugh’s observation,
according to which
[c]ontemporary metafictional writing is both a response and a contribution to an
even more thorough sense that reality or history are provisional: no longer a
world of eternal verities but a series of constructions, artifices, impermanent
structures.46
Pariani shares, in fact, the suspicion and scepticism towards master narratives that,
since the work of Jean-François Lyotard, is considered one of the principal characteristics of the postmodern cultural climate.47 Following what in the Italian context
are the lessons of oral history and microhistory, Pariani’s methodological choice is
not to deny History, but to look at it from below and from the margins, tracing
minor stories and reconstructing them in their fragmented, limited, peripheral,
and plural nature. In the postmodern awareness of being immersed in hegemonic
all-encompassing master narratives, the writer’s act of opposition lays in reasserting
the constructedness of every form of narration and inviting the reader to recognize it
as such. Nevertheless, the scepticism of a unique Truth does not lead to the negation
of social commitment, but to the search for the neglected and repressed partial truths
of the subalterns.
And yet, can we still call postmodern a poetics that adheres to the de-doxifying
mission, but that at the same time refuses absolute relativism in order to find its
centre of gravity in the minor, interdiscursive and plural dimension of stories?
Can we classify as postmodern a self-reflexive fiction that does not avoid dealing
with the relationship between art and reality, and with the role of literature in
society? Beyond the already cited reflection of Roland Weidle on how metanarrative
strategies can ‘express a certain view of the world’,48 it is helpful once again to look
FORSE SUCCEDE SEMPRE COSÌ QUANDO SI SCRIVE
467
at the poetics and ideology of Pariani through the prism of feminist criticism, with
particular focus on the spaces of negotiation and alliance between feminisms and
the postmodern.49 The meeting ground between postmodern disbelief and the feminist search for alternative anti-hegemonic narratives (to be used as a standpoint
from which to articulate a pragmatic project of intervening in reality) can be
found in the common ‘caution’ towards absolutes, the objections to master narratives, and the recognition of the complexity and plurality of experiences, voices,
stories, and narratives. As Linda Hutcheon observes, ‘feminisms are not incredulous
towards their metanarrative, even if they do contest the patriarchal one’.50 Pariani
writes precisely on within this terrain, in a balancing act between the incredulity
of the dominant doxa and the militant opposition to it.
The question is put differently if we use the traditional critical categories developed in the Italian context, where an interpretation of postmodern narrative
centred almost exclusively on the aspects of intellectual play and lack of social
engagement was widespread for a long time. This was frequently in opposition to
the issue of ‘impegno’, a topos in Italian arts and literature of the second half of
the Italian twentieth century.51 Such a limiting approach, and limited to some mainstream phenomena, has been questioned since the beginning of the twenty-first
century. After the publication of Fragments of impegno by Jennifer Burns
(2001),52 the question is not whether postmodern literature can be committed or
not, but what artistic forms the question of impegno can assume if based on the cardinal points of the postmodern: the shift from macro to micro, a concept of reality
experienceable and expressible only in fragments (in an anti-absolute perspective),
disbelief, irony, disenchantment, playfulness, and the recovery of the pleasure of
the text.
‘The intrinsic reflexivity of postmodern art’ – Pierpaolo Antonello and Florian
Mussgnug suggest – should therefore not be misunderstood as a mere ‘style’, but
treated as the structure and modality by which aesthetics come to the foreground.
Postmodernism foresees as its core a mature, complex, and intelligent reader,
ready to share the author’s aesthetic and ethical responsibility.53 We can therefore
consider their call to action to be still valid, and continue the discussion of contemporary Italian culture as
a particularly interesting testing-ground for the multiple, pluriform struggles
which we associate here with the idea of postmodernist impegno. […] A more
constructive and less ‘apocalyptic’ analysis of the cultural climate of the past
two decades in Italy, we believe, must pay attention to disillusionment and disengagement–a relapse towards the private; a radical commodification of cultural
values and products – but also investigate the importance of new forms of political and ethical awareness.54
In a reading of the postmodern not opposed to, but deeply intertwined with ethical
issues, the complexity and many facets of self-reflection in the work of a writer ‘from
the margins’ like Laura Pariani also invites critics to return to studying, theoretically
and historically, postmodern Italian narrative, a category that should possibly
be rethought over a longer period, with less rigid classifications, and with more
receptivity to possible interdisciplinary fertilizations.55
468
GIGLIOLA SULIS
NOTES
1
2
3
4
5
Laura Pariani, ‘L’uovo di Gertrudina’,
in Ead, L’uovo di Gertrudina (Milan:
Rizzoli, 2003), pp. 213–20 (pp. 217–
19).
Patricia Waugh, Metafiction: The
Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious
Fiction (London: Routledge, 2003),
p. 6, and later: ‘In other words, the
lowest common denominator of metafiction is simultaneously to create a
fiction and to make a statement about
the creation of that fiction’. For a
survey of definitions and studies of
‘metafiction’
and
‘metanarration’,
sometimes used by critics almost synonymously with self-reflection and sometimes with diverse meanings, see Birgit
Neumann,
‘Metanarration
and
Metafiction’, in the living handbook of
narratology, ed. by Peter Hühn et al.
(Hamburg: Hamburg University) <http
://www.lhn.uni-hamburg.de> [accessed
3 July 2015] (based on Peter Hühn,
Jan Christoph Meister, John Pier, and
Wolf Schmid, eds., Handbook of
Narratology [Berlin: Mouton de
Gruyter, 2009]).
Laura Pariani, La valle delle donne lupo
(Turin: Einaudi, 2011), p. 8.
An historical figure, Carlo Pariani was
Campana’s doctor in the mental hospital
at Castel Pulci, and he also wrote a biography of the poet. See Laura Pariani,
Questo viaggio chiamavamo amore
(Turin: Einaudi, 2015), p. 191.
Biographical data, bibliographical references, and an archive of reviews are
available on the writer’s site, <http://
www.omegna.net/pariani> [accessed 3
July 2015]. For an introduction to the
work of Pariani, see the following:
Domenica Perrone, ‘L’ossessione di raccontare. La narrativa di Laura Pariani’,
in La coscienza e il coraggio.
Esperienze letterarie della modernità,
ed. by Giovanna Caltagirone (Cagliari:
AM&D, 2005), pp. 809–21; Claudia
Nocentini, ‘Laura Pariani and the
Value of Experience’, in The Poetics of
the Margin: Mapping Europe from the
6
7
8
9
10
11
Interstices, ed. by Rossella Riccobono
(Oxford: Peter Lang, 2010), pp. 133–
56; Gigliola Sulis, ‘Dare voce alle vite
marginali. Plurilinguismo di genere
nella narrativa di Laura Pariani’, The
Italianist, 33 (2013), 405–26.
Laura Pariani, Quando Dio ballava il
tango (Milan: Rizzoli, 2002), e.g.
pp. 22, 79, 83.
On the emphasis on verbal musings in
metafiction, see Waugh, p. 48.
It is evident that Pariani’s game of mirroring herself in the text is not comparable with the recent phenomenon of
‘autofiction’, characterized by the
intended confusion between fact and
fiction, and linked to issues of aesthetic
consumption within a culture dominated by the mass media and the internet, as exemplified by authors such as
Walter Siti and Mauro Covacich. In
addition to the contributions by
Raffaele Donnarumma and Mara Santi
in this volume, see also Donnarumma’s
Ipermodernità. Dove va la narrativa
contemporanea (Bologna: Il Mulino,
2014).
Neumann, section 2. The texts mentioned in the quotation are fundamental
reference points with regard to selfreflection and narratology: Werner
Wolf, ‘Aesthetic (Illusion)’, in the living
handbook of narratology, and Monika
Fludernik,
Towards
a ‘Natural’
Narratology
(London:
Routledge,
1996).
I am borrowing the concept from
Roland Weidle, ‘The Ethics of
Metanarration: Empathy in Ian
McEwan’s The Comfort of Strangers,
The Child in Time, Atonement, and
Saturday’, in Ian McEwan: Art and
Politics, ed. by Pascal Nicklas
(Heidelberg: Winter, 2009), pp. 57–72
(p. 68). I will return to this aspect below.
Ansgar Nünning, ‘On Metanarrative:
Towards a Definition, a Typology, and
an Outline of the Functions of
Metanarrative Commentary’, in The
Dynamics of Narrative Form. Studies
FORSE SUCCEDE SEMPRE COSÌ QUANDO SI SCRIVE
12
13
14
15
16
in Anglo-American Narratology, ed. by
John Pier (Berlin: De Gruyter 2004),
(p. 17).
Nünning, ‘On Metanarrative: Towards
a Definition, a Typology, and an
Outline
of
the
Functions
of
Metanarrative Commentary’, p. 17.
The theoretical account is complemented by Monika Fludernik’s distinctions
between metafiction (centred on the artificiality of the story), metanarrative (on
the constructiveness of the discourse)
and non-narrational self-reflexivity
(e.g. structures of mise-en-abyme): see
Monika Fludernik, ‘Metanarrative and
Metafictional
Commentary:
From
Metadiscursivity to Metanarration and
Metafiction’, Poetica, 35 (2003), 1–39.
Nünning and Fludernik both refer to
Werner Wolf, ‘Metafiktion’ (1998), in
Metzler Lexikon Literatur – und
Kulturtheorie, ed. by Ansgar Nünning
(Stuttgard: Mettzler, 2004), pp. 447–48.
Laura Pariani, ‘L’uovo di Gertrudina’,
All of the following references to this
volume will be indicated in parentheses
in the main body of the text; when referring specifically to the excerpt given at
the opening of the essay, the page
numbers of the original are not given
for practical reasons.
See ‘I ferri vecchi e nuovi. Ventuno
domande di Renzo Federici a
Gianfranco Contini’, in D’Arco Silvio
Avalle, L’analisi letteraria in Italia.
Formalismo, Strutturalismo, Semiologia
(Milan-Naples:
Ricciardi,
1970),
pp. 216–28 (p. 221).
With ‘distant gaze’ I translate the Italian
title of Franco Moretti’s volume, La letteratura vista da lontano (Turin:
Einaudi, 2005) (in English, cf. Graphs,
Maps and Trees: Abstract Models for a
Literary History [London: Verso
Books, 2005]).
See Joseph North, ‘What’s “New
Critical” about “Close Reading”? I.A.
Richards and His New Critical
Reception’, New Literary History, 44
(2013), 141–57 (p. 155): ‘In the late
1970s and early 1980s […] a consensus
began to build around the idea that
17
18
19
20
21
469
aesthetic criticism of all kind had to be
rejected, on the grounds that the category of the “aesthetic” was irredeemably essentializing, universalizing, and
idealist – which, to many, mean politically conservative’.
Gabriele Pedullà and Sergio Luzzatto,
eds., Atlante della letteratura italiana
(Turin: Einaudi, 2010–12), 3 vols.
North, p. 155.
Wolf, ‘Metafiktion’.
Pariani’s first publications were two collections of stories, Di corno o d’oro
(1993) and Il pettine (1995). In the following collection, La perfezione degli
elastici (e del cinema) (1997), the
stories are held together by the
common theme of cinematography.
The other works tend to be short and/
or fragmented narratives. This also
goes for the novels which seem to have
a more unified plot, whether they focus
on a main event, as in La Signora dei
porci (1999) or Dio non ama i bambini
(2007), or reconstruct biographies of
real or invented characters. See for
example Garcilaso de la Vega in La
spada e la luna (1995), Friedrich
Nietzsche in La foto di Orta (2001),
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry in Tango per
una rosa (2005), the vagrant Dante in
Milano è una selva oscura (2010), the
old Fenísia in La valle delle donne lupo
(2011), and Dino Campana in Questo
viaggio chiamavano amore (2015).
Specular, almost a diptych, are Quando
Dio ballava il tango (2002) and L’uovo
di Gertrudina (2003), choral works constructed as series of female biographies
held together by a contemporary frame
story. While in the first book the frame
story is so relevant for the plot that the
text can be defined as a novel, in the
second the centripetal force of the individual portraits prevails, hence its presentation as a collection of short stories.
One notes how even minimal lexical
elements suggest the overlapping and
confusion of space and time: an
example is the ‘Fin del Mundo’ quoted
here and elsewhere, which, as well as
the reference value of the toponym,
470
22
23
24
25
26
27
GIGLIOLA SULIS
acquires the literal meaning of ‘fine del
mondo’ and becomes the postapocalyptic chronotope of the story of
Suor Tránsito, the last survivor of the
convent of Verapaz and perhaps of
humanity itself.
Such a recurring and explicit identification has been read by Giovanni
Pacchiano as a potential limit of the
writer, ‘[f]orse troppo portata a esternare sulla pagina la propria identificazione con i suoi personaggi e con il
loro tormento esistenziale’ (Giovanni
Pacchiano, ‘Recluse per liberare
l’anima. Sei storie di monache nell’ottimo romanzo di Laura Pariani’, Il Sole
24 Ore, 16 March 2003). On pain and
suffering as the existential features of
Pariani’s work, see Perrone, p. 809.
See Philippe Lejeune, Je est un autre:
l’autobiographie de la littérature aux
médias (Paris: Seuil, 1980).
See Walter Benjamin, ‘Der Erzähler.
Betrachtungen zum Werk Nikolai
Lesskows’ (1936) (Eng. trans.: ‘The
Storyteller. Reflections on the works of
Nikolai Leskov’, in Id. Illuminations
[New York: Schocken, 2007], pp. 83–
109).
On self-awareness (a typically postmodern issue) in relation to the narrator,
see Gerard Prince, Narratology. The
Form and Functioning of Narrative
(Berlin: De Gruyter, 1982), p. 12.
On the re-use of orality in literature, on
the mimesis of spoken language, and its
thematization in the text, see Elena
Porciani, ‘Studiare l’oralità letteraria.
Dalle figure del parlato al tema della
parola’, and ‘La narrazione come performance in Ragazzi di vita di Pier
Paolo Pasolini’, in Ead., Studi di oralità
letteraria (Pisa: ETS, 2008), pp. 23–36,
pp. 39–56.
Also in the mise en abyme that sees
Suor Tránsito turn from a nunguardian to a writer of her love story
(prelude to the metanarrative chapter
that ends the book), it is still desire
that generates the story and writing
(pp. 206–07). For an explicit declaration of writing as an act of love, see
28
29
La perfezione degli elastici ( e del
cinema)
(Milan:
Rizzoli,
1997),
p. 107: ‘L’ultima cosa che ci resta è
la letteratura. Tutto lo scrivere è un
atto d’amore, perché ogni forma di
comunicazione è testimonianza della
voglia di comprendere. È l’amore che
insegna a parlare. Tutto il resto è cianfrusaglia, un pizzico di nulla’.
Flight as a symbol of women’s fantastical escape from reality (the only one
they are allowed) is a topos of Pariani’s
stories (see the end of ‘Se tu ti formi
rosa’, p. 129, or La Signora dei porci
[Milan: Rizzoli, 1999], p. 253) and
also appears in her paintings and
comics. Some figures from La fata rovesciata, a comic signed with the pseudonym Laura Picco (Milan: Ottaviano,
1976), including that of flight, are gathered and commented on by the author in
Gigliola Sulis, ‘Il racconto come militanza: sulle radici femministe dell’opera
di Laura Pariani’, and ‘Gli anni settanta,
il femminismo, l’arte. Conversazione
con Laura Pariani’, in I Gender Studies
e il caso italiano, dagli anni Settanta a
oggi, ed. by Filippo Fonio and Lisa
El-Gahoui
(Grenoble:
Éditions
Universitaires de Grenoble, 2013),
pp. 303–24 (cf. image 6, p. 324). Real
and sinister, on the other hand, is Suor
Alice’s flight from an aeroplane to her
death at the end of ‘La voladora’
(pp. 131–50). This is the most realistic
of the stories in L’uovo di Gertrudina,
retracing the kidnapping and murder
of the French nuns Alice Domon and
Leonie Duquet under the Argentine dictatorship, as explained in the chapter’s
post-scriptum commentary. Suor Alice
is the only protagonist to be mentioned
only once in the final chapter; a symbol
of a reality which ‘resiste al racconto’,
this quasi-absence is also a sign of how,
for Pariani, the violence of the military
dictatorship in the seventies is too deep
and too recent a wound to allow her to
find peace through the imaginary rewritings of literature.
That this end is threatened by rhetorical excess has been noted by
FORSE SUCCEDE SEMPRE COSÌ QUANDO SI SCRIVE
30
31
32
33
Pacchiano: ‘Ci dice, la Pariani, nella
pagina finale, di credere al valore salvifico della letteratura. Tesi ammirevole e
astratta; se non fosse, qui, avallata da
una scrittura sussultante e terrosa, con
una lingua colloquiale solcata da
parole dialettali e gergali; senza esagerazioni. Tale da dare corpo e anima alle
sue storie’.
See also: ‘Potenza della musica e del
canto: ché sento il mondo delle mie
storie srotolarsi come una pergamena,
liberando altri tempi e altri spazi’.
See Virginia Woolf, ‘A Room of One’s
Own’ (1929), in A Room of One’s
Own. Three Guineas (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2008), pp. 1–150
(p. 4): ‘a woman must have money and
a room of her own if she is to write
fiction’.
In the analysed extract, see ‘le finestre in
cui si siamo affacciati’, ‘Antonia [che]
dalla finestra di palazzo Pusterla sta
ascoltando il canto di un canarino’; or,
a little later: ‘io me ne sto seduta al computer a scrivere questo racconto, imprecando se il telefono squilla riportandomi
a questo tempo: ciérrate sésamo […]’
(p. 216), or the table on which Suor
Tránsito sets her writing instruments in
the last pages of ‘Arcangeli di fumo’. In
other books, see ‘la Scrittrice’ who, at
her window at night, during breaks
from writing, discusses the story told
with the ‘Mietitore’, or also the narrator
in La straduzione, who asks herself: ‘E
quale senso ho io, seduta davanti a una
finestra; quale importanza hanno gli
scontri con mia madre, ora che lei non
c’è più, se io adesso non li rievoco con
qualcuno? Con te. L’unica cosa che ha
senso è il raccontare’ (Laura Pariani,
La straduzione [Milan: Rizzoli, 2004],
p. 46). A similar attention to the
relationship between the female body
and the female artist’s room, in particular to its confines, can be noticed in the
poetry of Antonella Anedda, Dal
balcone del corpo (Milan: Mondadori,
2007).
See Roland Barthes, ‘L’Effet de Réel’
(1968), in Id., Le bruissement de la
34
35
471
langue. Essays critiques IV (Paris:
Seuil, 2000), pp. 167–74 (Eng. trans.:
‘The reality effect’, in Id., The Rustle of
Language [Oxford: Blackwell, 1986],
pp. 141–48). This effect is pursued in
several ways in the text, including the
spatio-temporal notations presented as
accurate references, such as those that
seal the final chapter and the book:
‘Santiago de Chile, 2000 - Orta San
Giulio, 2002’ (p. 220).
Nünning, ‘On Metanarrative’ (and see
above supra, note 8).
It is not coincidental that the writer uses
the verb ‘raccogliere’ in the final paragraph of L’uovo di Gertrudina, in reference to her work as a writer: ‘nelle
pagine che voglio raccogliere’ (p. 220).
On storytelling as the work of gathering
and spinning clouds, see the elderly
farmer (the embodyment of a mythological Parca) in La Signora dei porci
(pp. 5–6): ‘Voglio una storia con una
donna seduta a filare in un cantuccio,
nel tempo del c’era una volta e una
volta non c’era; una vecchia contadina
che, di quando in quando, alzando
verso il cielo grigio una mano rinsecchita, artiglia con le sue lunghe unghie
nere un ciuffo dei nuvoli e, zac, l’infilza
nel suo fuso’. In a broader discussion
on ‘spinning’ and ‘weaving’ as metaphors
for
storytelling,
Corrado
Bologna focuses on ‘la presenza e la funzione genetico-testuale della figurazione
tessile in àmbito prosastico, ove la sua
pertinenza appare in linea teorica ancor
più limpida, anche tecnicamente
congrua, dal momento che il filo del discorso sembra replicare con plasticità,
nella trasposizione retorico-linguistica,
l’inattingibile, complessa e molteplice
“nuda verità” degli eventi, cioè il filo
della storia’. (Corrado Bologna, ‘Il filo
della storia. “Tessitura” della trama e
“ritmica” del tempo narrativo fra
Manzoni e Gadda’, Critica del testo, 1
[1998], 345–406; now in Edinburgh
Journal of Gadda Studies [EJGS] <http
://www.gadda.ed.ac.uk/Pages/resources/
archive/influences/bolognfilo.php>
[accessed 3 July 2015])
472
36
37
38
39
40
GIGLIOLA SULIS
It is worth highlighting how these are
also the years of development of oral
history and microhistory, connected
with the research methods of anthropology and ethnography; fertile beyond disciplinary confines, they are central for
Pariani’s literary project. Among the
most representative texts of this cultural
climate see at least Carlo Ginzburg, Il
formaggio e i vermi. Il cosmo di un
mugnaio del ’500 (Turin: Einaudi,
1976) (Eng. Trans.: The Cheese and
the Worms. The Cosmos of a
Sixteenth-Century Miller [Baltimore:
The Johns Hopkins University Press,
1980]).
For the context, and the relevence of this
period in the formation of the writer, see
Sulis, Pariani, ‘Gli anni settanta, il femminismo, l’arte’, and Sulis, ‘Il racconto
come militanza’. On Italian feminism
in the 1970s, see Judith Adler Hellman,
Journeys among Women. Feminism in
Five Italian Cities (Cambridge: Polity
Press, 1987), and in particular ‘Milan:
Feminism in a Cosmopolitan city’,
pp. 81–110.
The preference and symbolic relevance
of the feminine do not in fact exclude
male protagonists, provided they
respect the criteria of marginality
(social, geographical or individual); in
chronological order, from Carlén in her
first published story, ‘Di corno o
d’oro’, to Dino Campana in Questo
viaggio chiamavamo amore.
Alessia Ronchetti, ‘Postmodernismo e
pensiero italiano della differenza sessuale: una questione politica’, in
Postmodern impegno: Ethics and
Commitment in Contemporary Italian
Culture, ed. by Pier Paolo Antonello
and
Florian
Mussgnug
(New York-Oxford: Peter Lang, 2009),
pp. 99–119 (p. 107).
Adriana Cavarero, A più voci. Filosofia
dell’espressione
vocale
(Milan:
Feltrinelli, 2003), pp. 53–54 (Eng.
Trans.: For More than One Voice:
Towards a Philosophy of Vocal
Expression [Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press, 2005]).
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
See Gayatri C. Spivak, ‘Can the
Subaltern Speak?’, in Marxism and the
Interpretation of Culture, ed. by Cary
Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg
(Basingstoke:
Macmillan,
1988),
pp. 271–313 (now in A Critic of
Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History
of the Vanishing Present [Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1999]).
Linda Hutcheon, Narcissistic Narrative:
The Metafictional Paradox (London;
New York: Methuen, 1984).
Beyond defining the emotional link of
sharing that ties the oral storyteller
(from Homeric times) and his/her
public, empathy has been highlighted
by some scholars as a specific characteristic of female fiction. For example, an
empathic reaction to the ‘uncanny’ (i.e.
an attitude of openness, compassion,
even affection and love for ‘the
strange’), is considered the defining
element of the female declination of the
Fantastic in twentieth-century Italian
women writers (see: Monica Farnetti,
‘Anxiety-Free:
Readings
of
the
Freudian “Uncanny”’, in The Italian
Gothic and Fantastic. Encounters and
Rewritings of Narrative Traditions, ed.
by Francesca Billiani and Gigliola Sulis
[Madison, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson,
2007], pp. 46–56).
Neumann,
‘Metanarration
and
Metafiction’.
Weidle, p. 68.
Waugh, Metafiction, p. 7.
Jean-François Lyotard, La condition
postmoderne. Rapport sur le savoir
(Paris: Minuit, 1979) (Eng. trans.: The
Postmodern Condition. A report on
knowledge [Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 1984]).
Weidle, p. 57.
On postmodernism as a ‘natural ally’ of
feminism, see Linda J. Nicholson,
‘Introduction’,
in
Feminism/
Postmodernism, ed. by Ead (London/
New York: Routledge, 1990), pp. 1–16
(p. 5). See also Ead., ‘Feminism and the
Politics of Postmodernism’, boundary
2, 19 (1992), 53–69. Among the few
scholars to focus on the relation
FORSE SUCCEDE SEMPRE COSÌ QUANDO SI SCRIVE
50
51
52
between the postmodern and feminist
philosophers in Italy, see Alessia
Ronchetti.
Linda Hutcheon, ‘Incredulity toward
Metanarrative:
Negotiating
Postmodernism and Feminisms’ (1989),
in Ambiguous Discourse: Feminist
Narratology and British Women
Writers, ed. by Kathy Mezei (Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 1996), pp. 262–67 (p. 266).
The first introduction to the postmodern
published in Italy was Remo Ceserani,
Raccontare il postmoderno (Turin:
Bollati Boringhieri, 1997), followed on
the philosophical side by Monica
Jansen, Il dibattito sul postmoderno in
Italia: in bilico tra dialettica e
ambiguità (Florence: Cesati, 2002) (for
an
update,
see
Ead.,
‘Has
Postmodernism
Ended?
Dialectics
Revisited
(Luperini,
Belpoliti,
Tabucchi)’,
in
Antonello
and
Mussgnug, pp. 49–60). As for the ideological opposition to the postmodern,
in favour of a broadly defined ‘realist literature’, see Romano Luperini, La fine
del postmoderno (Naples: Guida,
2005); Raffaele Donnarumma, Gilda
Policastro, and Giovanna Taviani, eds.,
Ritorno alla realtà? Narrativa e cinema
alla fine del postmoderno, themed
section of Allegoria. Per uno studio
materialistico della letteratura, XX,
third series, 57 (2008), 7–93.
Jennifer Burns, Fragments of impegno:
Interpretations of Commitment in
Contemporary Italian Narrative, 1980–
53
54
55
473
2000 (Leeds: Northern Universities
Press, 2001), and Ead., ‘Re-thinking
Impegno (again): Reading, Ethics and
Pleasure’, in Antonello and Mussgnug,
pp. 61–81.
Pier Paolo Antonello and Florian
Mussgnug, ‘Introduction’, in Antonello
and Mussgnug, pp. 1–30 (p. 20).
Antonello
and
Mussgnug,
‘Introduction’, pp. 3–4.
For surveys of the contemporary novel,
see Gianluigi Simonetti, ‘Sul romanzo
italiano di oggi. Nuclei tematici e costanti figurali’, Contemporanea, III, 4
(2005), 55–85, Id. ‘I nuovi assetti della
narrativa
italiana
(1996–2006)’,
Allegoria, XX, third series, 57 (2008),
95–136, and Alberto Casadei, Stile e tradizione nel romanzo italiano contemporaneo (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2007). Owing
to the lack of a shared contemporary
canon (Casadei, p. 27), it is perhaps
more useful to follow the various blogs
of both academic and ideological
critics. For example, Le parole e le
cose. Letteratura e realtà hosts in 2015
an ongoing survey, edited by Claudia
Crocco, Letteratura e critica. Sei
domande a scrittori e critici nati negli
anni Ottanta. In the fifth part, which
appeared on 30 June 2015, one of the
interviewed critics, Carlo Tirinanzi De
Medici, cites Pariani’s Milano è una
selva oscura, generally absent from contemporary reviews, as a significant work
in contemporary literature (<http://www
.leparoleelecose.it/?p=19538#>
[accessed 3 July 2015]).
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTOR
Gigliola Sulis is Associate Professor of Italian at the University of Leeds. Her research interests
are mainly in the field of modern and contemporary Italian fiction, from a stylistic and narratological approach. She has worked in particular on the multilingual novel, regional and
dialect literatures (especially Sardinian and Sicilian); language and style of twentieth- and
twenty-first-century Italian writers, and women’s writing. She has edited the Scritti giornalistici (1966–1995) by Sergio Atzeni (Nuoro: Il Maestrale, 2005) and is co-editor with Francesca
Billiani of The Italian Gothic and Fantastic. Encounters and Re-writings of Narrative Traditions (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson, 2007).
Correspondence to: Gigliola Sulis. Email: g.sulis@leeds.ac.uk
Gigliola Sulis