Dossier - La Letteratura Italiana Contemporanea: tendenze, evoluzioni-involuzioni, contraddizioni (III p.)

Negli ultimi anni, comunque, In Italia sono state pubblicate diverse raccolte di racconti dello stesso autore (soprattutto da medio-piccoli editori), a dimostrazione – semmai ce ne fosse davvero bisogno – di quanto le narrazioni brevi sono ancora intensamente presenti, necessarie e piene di potenzialità. Il considerare le short stories come ‘appendici’ - non sempre necessarie - della ‘dimensione romanzo’, è un dictat contro cui difficilmente sarà possibile mutare le visioni del panorama italiano. È altresì rilevante, infine, come nel web i racconti godano di ottima salute, pur finendo spesso nell’oceano delle virtualità, indipendentemente da criteri di qualità o letterarietà in senso stretto, la voglia di scrivere storie brevi resiste anche tra gli italiani.

***

1.3 Plot vs language

The hard game between the weight of plot and the magnetic power of language is still in a tie. Plot and language are indeed the polar opposites of narrative. In the past it was believed that, ideally, no story could be written either without a plot or without a language.

Nowadays this assumption is not so certain. Many instances can be put forward that today the borderline is getting thinner: the borderline between novels with or without a plot, and between novels with or without a language, where language in this context may be intended either as a widely used way of communication or, on the contrary, as an unconventional code of narrative style. 

Actually, this conflict has never ended. Lately it broke out again across Italy, as a result of one of the trends of our contemporary literature: the search for skilful narrations, that is for novels in which authors almost entirely focus their attention on the language or, better, on the research of a self-sustained style which – by means of the symbols and the communication levels it conveys – has the ambition to be the utmost expression of themselves.

Be the quest for skilful narrations a well-established inclination or just a necessity, in some Italian novels the plot weight tends to disappear, and the facts of the story literally drown in a magma of words. Basically, the author’s main efforts in these texts are devoted not to the plot in itself, but to its expression through his peculiar language style.

In “Il nemico”, 2009, author Emanuele Tonon sketches a family plot which is just a minor feature if compared to the way his sharply theological language reveals Evil and Iniquities of Life, Beauty and the Authenticity of Sorrow, and the wild fury of “bare things”:

My father’s body was the exact appearance of God in the world: it was Nothing. […]
Battles can be won, but not the night, I say to myself while I am looking at the black space behind the living room door. My half-burnt bride’s body is beginning to weigh, as if really she had a weight, heavily on my back. 

Besides skilful narrations, some other novels keep on telling stories rich in facts, in characters and with a core of interwoven plots and under-plots. Novels in which plot is still an accurately polished development of a number of different actions.

Moreover, skilful narrations are not to be mistaken for that particular kind of novels which, at the end of the story, give the readers the impression that nothing has really happened. This is the case of some Italian books where, even though the plot is intentionally left in the background, the language texture is not remarkable at all. 

Anyway, beyond the authorial choices in terms of recovery of the word power or of deconstruction of the so-called best-seller language, it is clear that in ICL plots are not considered any more as one of the two main polar elements of narration, as inviolable and certain as language. Plots are still present in books but, in a way, their own features have been modified. Actually, there are novels in which their traditional weight has been substituted by some lighter facts, useful to build a basic structure to sustain the entire fiction. This is not necessarily a way ‘to please’ the reader; it is rather a deliberate option of the writer in order to avoid the development of new themes, characters, or what these writers feel as unnecessary twists and turns of the story.

In other words: rather than just ‘creating facts’, these writers prefer to understand why they are happening. Their key-words are registering, analyzing, digging and getting deeper.

In “La stanza di sopra”, 2007, author Rosella Postorino studies the figure of a young teenager whose life is frozen in her own house for the presence of her sick father in “the room upstairs”. A father terminally ill, whose death is certain, except for its time. An absolutely static story, where the emphasis is not on the single actions, but on the inner movements of the mind, on the gradual revelation of the actions, and on the influence this situation casts on the young protagonist’s mind:

My mother is playing the piano, and the silence here upstairs is filthy, it smells of death, why my father do you smell of death how can you do this to me where am I stupid child playing near the couch a common object in my hand keeping it motionless nothing else look, I throw it, then I take it again, I take the glass on your night table, I throw it, it hits, it is broken.

In “Quando verrai”, 2009, author Laura Pugno tells us the fairy tale of a child in a shattered family who has to face the sexual harassment of her mother’s new partner. Young Eva is endowed with surprising powers as she can foresee the death of those who try to touch her. Apparently her freckled skin is ill, but entire worlds of meanings and new perceptions are hidden in its patches. A novel where the main focus is not on the plot but, once again, on the language:

She closes her eyes. She feels sickness coming from her stomach and laying her out, making her fall to the ground, on the thick grass she had just risen from, hidden in the darkness, making her slide on her knees, then she lets herself fall, her knees drawn in her arms, as if she could sleep, and lapse into pain.

1.4 Length
Be it a result of the minor influence of the plot, or rather a need from the public for easier and faster stories, more appealing for our time of technology and instant communication, at present the tendency in the Italian publishing industry is the offer of ‘short’ novels, with a number of pages between 100 and 140 (sometimes up to 160).

Obviously, longer novels - with more than 200 or 300 pages – still survive, but the dominant trend is towards texts with faster (or relatively faster) rhythms.

Enclosing a story into a smaller space is sometimes a deliberate choice of the writers in order to depurate it from every possible overproduction of words, and to concentrate on the real meanings they want to communicate.

Author Daniele Del Giudice, for instance, in ‘Orizzonte mobile’, 2009, a short 142-page novel, fits the fragments of a number of travels and exposes the inner meanings of a whole life in motion. His significant, intense language accounts for some extreme journeys between the Past and the Present without indulging in descriptions, just showing the plain facts and thoughts. In this book, the reduced length is perfectly functional. 

1.5. Short stories
As a matter of fact, short stories have never been appreciated by Italian publishers, and have been always considered unappealing, exceedingly short, and difficult to be inserted into the popular formats of editions.

In the past and still at present, Italy lacks in a proper “short story culture”, and the art of brief narration has scarcely been granted with creative dignity. Very often, short stories are dismissed as literary experimentations, or regarded as a sort of tests or anticipations of longer works.

Anyway, particularly between the Nineties and the following decade, some remarkable collections have been published in Italy, where the general inspiration of the stories was connected to shared themes, well-known authors or collective social projects.

Moreover, a few Italian publishers have launched some collections in order to promote a number of talented unknown, worthy-to-be-read writers, counting upon the fact that the reduced length of their stories could attract readers who were not used to the canonical dimension of a novel.  
Eclectic publisher Giulia Belloni, for instance, has decided, from 2004 on, to begin every single series of her company’s with collections of short stories (the first of them titled “Gli intemperanti”) from writers whose individual novels have later been published.

This approach to short story collections as a form of scouting for new authors (or, anyway, of promoting emerging or promising talents) began in 1996 with the book “Gioventù cannibale”, edited by Daniele Brolli, a collection of short stories by – among others – Niccolò Ammaniti, Aldo Nove, Andrea G. Pinketts, Daniele Luttazzi, authors who later started a personal writing and publishing career.

Two more examples of the genre: 
“Anteprima nazionale”, 2009, edited by Giorgio Vasta, a collection of short stories by, among others, Tullio Avoledo, Valerio Evangelisti, and Ascanio Celestini; 
“Voi siete qui”, 2007, edited by Mario Desiati, a short story collection with the deliberate purpose of promoting new writers.

In recent years a lot of short story collections by single authors has been published in Italy (especially by small or medium-sized companies). This, once again, clearly demonstrates how pregnant, essential and full of potentiality the art of brief narration is.
Anyway, the bad reputation in the Italian literary society of short stories, often regarded as an unnecessary appendix to the novel, really appears as an imposed diktat, against which it will be hard to struggle successfully. On the other hand, it is worth noting how appreciated the Italian short stories on the Internet are, even though they often run the risk of drowning in the ocean of virtual reality, regardless of their literary value. 
After all, we can conclude that the will of writing short stories is still strong in Italian writers.