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Disrupted Narratives: Illness, Silence and Identity in Svevo, Pressburger and Morandini

2015; Cambridge University Press; Volume: 35; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.33137/q.i..v35i1.22367

2293-7382

Emma Bond, Thomas Harrison,

Italian Fascism and Post-war Society

Something like the "paradox of the liar" complicates all critical claims about La coscienza di Zeno.When a Cretan says "All Cretans are liars" it is impossible to tell whether this is true or false.Worse still, if the claim is true it is false, and if it is a lie it supports its own truth.Zeno sets up his story in a similar way -narrating it for the benefit of a psychoanalyst he intends to deceive.If psychoanalysis is right (in believing that the intentions of words are unreliable) then everything that Zeno presents in this book must be put into question.This holds even for cases when he criticizes himself from the perspective of another, like that of Ada the woman he intended to marry, whose final, grotesque illness offers a "reproach" to Zeno's ostensible health and honesty.The beautiful Ada is one of Emma Bond's captivating examples of bodily illness and disfigurement-couched in verbal dysfunction and in the person of females-which dramatically contest or disrupt the narratives of males (see her full title).Bond skillfully shows how Ada's disfigurement and refusal to speak offer devastating indictments of Zeno's self-serving narrative.The problem, however, is that it is he who is telling us about Ada; who is filtering and narrating her acts.The critical rhetoric of Ada is his own invention; it does not speak from a space outside his own.Bond does not let this liar's paradox get in her way.She follows Ada and others to the space of a female voice, of a rebelling and autonomous body, militating against the normative rhetoric of male-gendered spiritual authority.If Ada sparks the image of a Russian doll imbedded within another, most of the rest of the stories Bond studies (which are not told in the first person) may not be so problematic.They are Svevo's Senilità, Giorgio Pressburger's intriguing La legge degli spazi bianchi, and Giuliana Morandini's Caffè Specchi.Bond focuses on their points of resistance, on the 'blank spaces' (136) that make phallogocentric discourse founder.(The entirety of Morandini's novel is conveyed in the revelatory mode of this discourse, making dominant a female consciousness besieged and sickened by the urban pressures of Trieste.Incidentally, considering that all authors write in this marginal, porous, counter-cultural space of Trieste, one wonders to what extent their narratives are not already "dolls within dolls," militating against broader, historical paradigms.)Bond, however, is less concerned with the external than with the internal tensions of the texts.The heterotopic elements, the disruption of language, the outcry of the otherwise silent organs (the "silence of the organs" is one notion of health itself ) take us to the realm of repression: to the space of the "pre-symbolic," prior to ego formation, of the pre-linguistic body, of the mother, the chora and the semiosis of Julia Kristeva.This is the "space-off " of potentially feminine consciousness, here erupting in ill women and girls.Bond's findings are entrancing, most clearly with our contemporary Pressburger, whose works call for precisely these types of probing.Her findings are fundamental, especially to the understanding of the distraught subjectivity of Morandini's Caffè Specchi.They are sweeping, exuberant and ethically intense-as is proper for literary criticism, which takes such time that it should