Search

The contribution suggests a lecture of Nicola Pugliese’s novel Malacqua. Quattro giorni di pioggia nella città di Napoli in attesa che si verifichi un accadimento straordinario, in which we find a catastrophic natural event that puts a strain on the city from both the material and the cultural- psychological points of view. It tries, at least, to deal with the text from three points of view: the frirst one is the theory of the fantastic, because of the supernatural atmosphere that surrounds the catastrophe; the second one is that of the literary-anthropological studies about the representation of the apocalypse; the last one is the thougt of the waiting/expectation as a typical narrative theme of contemporary writing. Pugliese’s novel didn’t turn out to be a speech aimed to the representation of the apocalyptic instant, that is to say ‘detector of the disaster’. On the contrary it has proven to be a speech designed to the expectation of this ‘extraordinary event’ that can shake from the foundations each perceptive-cognitive category.

In this essay, we take into consideration the relationship between the concept of “phantasmic” developed by Savinio in his writings on art, that of “marvelous” proposed by Breton (compared with various definitions of the fantastic), and the dissolution of the traditional novel carried out in Angelica or the night in May (1927). Thus, we aim to analyze some stylistic and narrative techniques through which the alienating process is implemented in the writing of Savino. Attention is focused, above all, on issues and forms related to the questioning of optical-perspective normality and on the relationships between alternative reality paradigms. Finally, an attempt is made to develop a satisfactory interpretation of Savinio’s anti-novel through a comparison with Sklovsky’s reflections in order to highlight its structural ambiguity.