Journal of Romance Studies Volume 10 Number 1, Spring 2010: 37–49doi:10.3167/jrs.2010.100104 ISSN 1473–3536 (Print), ISSN 1752–2331 (Online)

Unidentifi ed narrative objects: notes for a rhetorical typology

Dimitri Chimenti

Abstract

h is article attempts to circumscribe a fi eld of enquiry around what Wu Ming 1 defi ned as ‘unidentifi ed narrative objects’. It demonstrates how, within narratives such as Asce di Guerra (2000) [Axes of War] by Wu Ming and Vitaliano Ravagli, Gomorra (2006) [Gomorrah] by Roberto Saviano, Dies irae (2006) [Day of Wrath] by Giuseppe Genna and Sappiano le mie parole di sangue (2007) [My Words be Bloody] by Babsi Jones, a recurrent series of modal fi gures defi nes the relationship between literature and the real. Starting from Gomorra, the article attempts to delineate a taxonomy, to make sense of the continuous overlapping and re-bidding between the textual and the extra-textual fi elds at stake in the novels. h e aim is both to clarify how these novels take up a liminal literary position and to deepen our understanding of their own peculiar form of realism. h e notion of realism in this context refers less to a stylistic construct according to specifi c compositional codes than to a ‘textualization of the real’, wherein reality presents itself within the texts through a system of references external to the text itself.Keywords: realism; textualization of the real; taxonomy; textual analysis; postmodernism; unidentifi ed narrative objects; hybridization; Gomorra

Gnoseological premiss: novels and ‘narrative objects’In his ‘Memorandum’ on the New Italian Epic, Wu Ming 1 suggested that a part of recent Italian literary production displays common features. h ese include: the overcoming of a postmodernist ideology; the search for a testimonial function in literature; and the articulation of a critical discourse about the relationship between the present and the past. A common objection to this proposition is that the works Wu Ming 1 categorized as New Italian Epic do not display suffi ciently strong links or similarities to form a coherent corpus. h is critique has some basis, but it does not mean that all the hypotheses and insights of the ‘Memorandum’ have to be rejected, especially since it concerns recent literature that is exactly contemporary with Wu Ming 1’s essay. We may not be bound merely to accept (or to reject) Wu Ming 1’s analysis, but it would be amiss, in terms of critique and theory alike, not to engage with it at all. h is article attempts to circumscribe a fi eld of enquiry around what Wu Ming (2009) defi ned as ‘unidentifi ed narrative objects’. In the fi rst section, I discuss the formal nature of such ‘unidentifi ed narrative objects’. In the second section, I dwell on a theoretical question, by positing a diff erence between the concept of ‘realism’ as opposed to that of the ‘textualization of the real’. In the

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third section, I proceed to analyse a specifi c text, Roberto Saviano’s Gomorra (2006) [Gomorrah], attempting to highlight how it constructs narrative out of archival materials (newspaper articles, surveillance recordings, interrogation fi les). I conclude by elaborating the concept of ‘double track’ in the historical novel, the development of two diff erent kinds of representation that then intertwine to generate a narrative. Wu Ming 1 employs the nomenclature of ‘unidentifi ed narrative objects’ in relation to a limited number of novels. Although the list must remain partial and tentative, his examples of narrative objects include: Asce di guerra (2005) [Axes of War] by Wu Ming and Vitaliano Ravagli, Gomorra by Saviano, Dies irae (2006) [Day of Wrath] by Giuseppe Genna, and Sappiano le mie parole di sangue (2007) [My Words be Bloody] by Babsi Jones (see Wu Ming 2009: 41–4). h ese are also the novels that I analyse in this article.

Yet, what exactly is a narrative object?

Fiction e non-fi ction, prosa e poesia, diario e inchiesta, letteratura e scienza, mitologia e pochade. Negli ultimi quindici anni molti autori italiani hanno scritto libri che non possono essere etichettati o incasellati in alcun modo, perché contengono quasi tutto. [...] Non è soltanto un’ibridazione ‘endo-letteraria’, entro i generi della letteratura, bensì l’utilizzo di qualunque cosa possa servire allo scopo. (Wu Ming 2009: 41)

[Fiction and non-fi ction, prose and poetry, diary and survey, literature and science, mythology and pochade (farce). In the last fi fteen years, several Italian authors have written books that cannot be labelled or categorized in any way, since they contain almost everything. (...) h is is not merely an ‘endo-literary’ hybridization within literary genres, but rather it constitutes the usage of anything whatsoever that may serve the purpose.]1

According to Wu Ming 1, while having the articulation and narrative dynamics of a novel proper, a narrative object also includes other elements, which are seemingly derived from other literary forms, such as the essay, the diary or the reportage. Nonetheless, this is not simply the matter of a hybrid genre, but rather an attempt either to simulate or to include non-literary discursive forms. On occasion, this technique causes these novels to ‘resemble’ something else, such as a journalistic survey, a diary, an essay, or even a record of diverse testimonies.

It is therefore diffi cult, from a literary point of view, to name the category to which the narrative objects belong: they destabilize the order of the novel genre, causing turbulences and fl uctuations around its borders. h ey could be defi ned as polycentric systems that generate forces expanding from within, and thus occasioning a crisis in the distinction between inside and outside, literary and extra-literary. h e result is an extreme ‘tension between forms’, which tests the fl exibility of the ‘novel’ genre without quite destroying it and turning it into an ‘anti-novel’. In other words, an ‘unidentifi ed narrative object’ enacts a theory of signifi cation indicative of its own paradoxes, while at the same time prompting the task of overcoming them.

Two key points for consideration are proposed. First, the intention of the ‘Memorandum’ is not to destroy the novel, but, rather, forcibly to modify its compositional parameters. Second, although the concept of narrative object has the

Unidentifi ed narrative objects 39

advantage of providing a name for a literary mode, whose borders we can neither know nor measure as yet, we should understand it as no more than a provisional defi nition. From the second half of the twentieth century, the novel has been diffi cult to categorize, and its unstable form enables it to combine with other (not only literary) discursive genres. If the narrative objects Wu Ming 1 proposes eventually consolidate into a corpus of recognizable works, or even a literary canon, the novel as a genre would then include them, by means of having been enlarged and re-debated.

h e concept of a narrative object is not so diff erent from the novel genre. Yet it does contain important indexes about the kinds of analysis that are appropriate to the study of texts that resemble fractal objects. A narrative object, like a snowfl ake under a microscope, has an irregular shape, generated, as it were, by mere chance. For the snowfl ake, Euclidean geometry may off er only approximate measurement, and it does not follow that no other analytical instruments may be capable of greater precision. Similarly, if we wish to off er more accurate descriptions of these novels, it will be necessary to elaborate new strategies of observation, based upon the complexity of the object under scrutiny.

Linguistic violence and a surge of rebelliousness characterize such novels as Genna’s Dies irae or Jones’s Sappiano le mie parole di sangue, which suggests that we may be dealing with the literary version of action painting – a semantic explosion, bursting from an incontrollable deep impulse, rather than a predetermined project. Yet it would be wrong to consider these works as failed novels. Narrative objects may not as yet have identifi ed the form of the literary object that would realize them, but they attract contents that consolidate as a scene, a linguistic choice, or a specifi c positioning of the narrator; and these, in turn, produce the desired eff ect. Literary criticism should focus on these strengths and search for the emblematic features of these works, rather than judge them negatively against existing literary criteria. My own analysis operates from within the text, explicating its formal language and, in the process, aims to develop the necessary analytical and terminological tools.

Only the most signifi cant works of an epoch exceed the limits of traditional form. In those works, traditional structures cease to be immediately recognizable, yet the new ones are not fully formed. It does not exactly entail an abdication of the formal narrative duties of a novel, but, rather, as Walter Benjamin puts it: ‘Un’opera signifi cativa – o fonda il genere oppure lo liquida; nelle opere perfette le due cose si fondono’ (Benjamin 1999: 23) [‘A signifi cant work either founds the genre or vanquishes it; in perfect works the two things merge’].

Now that I have explained how narrative objects are novels, their common traits need to be understood. h ere is a sense of similarity in their narrative relation to reality: the space-time location is usually very precise, and also, most of the events and characters are referential.2 However, it is important to avoid reducing these novels to a generic ‘return to reality’, without a prior enquiry into how such reality may be achieved. In particular, it is important not to focus exclusively on the ‘what’, the material reality referred to by the work, and to disregard the ‘how’, the construction of the real to be found only within the work. h is is particularly relevant in this study; a focus on the ‘how’ helps us understand the connection between these novels and

Dimitri Chimenti40

the real, a connection that goes beyond simple surface adherence to reality, or even a mirror-eff ect. It thus becomes clear how the work functions as a possible locus for the re-elaboration of the cultural and linguistic codes that structure our experience of things. h is enables a concept of the real, not as an initial given, but rather as a result, a process in a world that we may not have known before; and that, caught in its obviousness, we risk never knowing.

Realism and textualization of the realWhen we refer to ‘realism’ in literature, it is always necessary to qualify the concept. Rather than a univalent and self-evident concept, realism in literature is of course always the eff ect of a specifi c way in which the real is constructed at a textual level. In a literary work, we never fi nd the real as it is, but rather a layering of realism – a manipulation of the real, and not a mirroring of it. A ‘thematic’ realism may be identifi ed, which represents determinant aspects of how individuals inhabit their world, and is linked to socio-political themes. h e elements of reality to be thematized are, in this case, the dominant articulations and power relations of a specifi c society at a specifi c time.

Wu Ming 1’s narrative objects participate in this literary dimension of thematic realism: his Asce di guerra tells of the continuity between Fascist and Republican Italy; Saviano’s Gomorra analyses the structural relations between economic-political power and criminal power; Genna’s Dies irae revisits the last twenty-fi ve years of Italian history, to highlight a process of degenerative spectacularization; Jones’s Sappiano le mie parole di sangue off ers a counter-informative and revisionist narration of the Balkan wars. h ematic realism may include stylistic elements which produce a mimetic eff ect: for example, literary language is enriched by expressions from spoken language. In turn, this may occasionally result in a simplifi cation of syntax: for example, the preference for parataxis over hypotaxis:3

‘Ma che cazzo stai a di?’ lo fulmina Vasquez ‘Te tira il culo a mettere insieme aggressori e aggrediti? Le Brigate Nere torturavano i prigionieri, pure quelli già destinati all’esecuzione, che non avevano più niente da confessa. Ste robe i partigiani non l’hanno mai fatte! E lo sai quanti so’ dovuti andar via dall’Italia per sfuggire alle persecuzioni? Jugoslavia, Cecoslovacchia, Russia.’ (Wu Ming and Ravagli 2005: 113)

[‘What the fuck are you saying?’ thunders Vasquez ‘Does your ass stretch if you put aggressors and victims together? h e Black Brigades tortured their prisoners, even those already doomed to execution, those who had nothing more to confess. Partisans never did such stuff ! Do you know how many had to leave Italy to escape persecution? Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, Russia.’]

Here realism appears as the result of a psychological, stylistic and rhetorical eff ect, linked to the textual codifi cation of reality, rather than to the reality of what is being described. Realism is, then, a rhetorical domain, a purely textual eff ect entirely contained within the limits of the text and its codes.4 Nevertheless, such codes may break down, without compromising the reality of what is being narrated. h e fi rst

Unidentifi ed narrative objects 41

page of Genna’s Dies irae, for example, opens with the description of the artesian well into which a young boy, Alfredino Rampi, fell on the evening of 10 June 1981 (real-life fact).5 h e expressive codes employed to describe the scene do not aim at an eff ect of realism (contrary to that in Wu Ming and Ravagli’s Asce di guerra):

E nel centro di questo Paese che muore, nella piana dolce laziale, in fondo a un buco è una piccola mummia raggrinciata come un feto e piccina di fango che copre il corpicino di un bimbo e ancora non si leva da lui lamento o se si leva da lui, sepolto vivo 36 metri sotto il terreno in un foro di centimetri 30, nessuno lo ascolta poiché il foro traverso cui è precipitato è stato coperto. Da una lastra. Metallica. (Genna 2006: 3-4)

[And at the centre of this dying Country, in the mild Latial plains, at the bottom of a hole is a small mummy, withered like a foetus, small, mud-made, covering the small body of a boy-child, while no lament comes from him, or if it does, as he is buried alive 36 metres below the ground in a hole 30 centimetres wide, nobody listens to him because the hole through which he has fallen has been covered. With a slab. Of metal.]

h e literary use of language, clearly showing Alessandro Manzoni’s infl uence, brings about rhythmic and discursive fragmentation (as in ellipsis and parataxis: ‘Of metal’), to conjure an eff ect of discontinuity between stylistic codes and the object of the narrative. Such a distance does not relate to irony, which is completely absent from the narrative. Rather, the identifi cation of the reader with the narrating voice is suspended, due to a prosody that resists any perceptual anchoring and thus inhibits the actualization of the tragic content of the tale. In other words, the ‘fake language’, of Manzonian assonances and breaks in the prose, de-structures and transforms the widely televised image of a boy fallen into a pit, returning it to its inassimilable (and human) ‘otherness’.

What is deconstructed is not the reality of the event, but, rather, the rhetorical apparatuses that convey and spectacularize the latter. A novel like Dies irae suggests that, while the spectacularization of the real disallows the trauma of the experience, writing itself makes it possible. From this perspective, it seems even more real than reality, when it causes certain semantic strata to emerge. h is is not a linguistic divertissement, but an attempt to reach a cognitive experience of the event – which was denied during its original media coverage.

A further type of realism is created within the text, rather than originating from the representation or simulation of an external world. In this case, a useful comparison comes from the visual arts, especially the work of such artists as Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso. Material glued on the canvas gains its function either from the richness of semantic detail (directing one’s reading of the works, as in the case of newspaper article or a readable label), or from its materiality (wallpaper or a piece of cloth) that allows for a diff erent type of realism: the passage from a fl at dimension into relief. A similar process can be observed in literature. Pieces of reality inserted into a novel often come from archives (quotations from other books, newspaper articles, or from literary and extra-literary discourses). h ey may serve to inform the reader about a certain event or historical period. Historical documents, and the events they refer to,

Dimitri Chimenti42

seem to extend into a literary double of sorts, allowing the real to slide into its own textual reconstruction.

h e inclusion of documents in novels such as Asce di guerra or Gomorra thus functions as a support to their ability to represent the real in a plausible manner. h is comes from the proximity between denotive and representative modes. Yet, as we will see, it becomes more complex, since, when a novel includes excerpts from external documents, it is bound to transform them. It transfers into them a typical feature of literary texts – (re-)readability. It is easier to (re-)read a novel like Gomorra than the legal documents Saviano used in the novel (unless one is a lawyer, of course). Yet it is true that, just as in the raised texture of the paintings mentioned above, the inclusion of pieces of reality in a fi ction text does not always produce a higher degree of readability of the real. It may be the opposite: the real becomes opaque until we are unable to distinguish it from what is not real.

In Jones’s Sappiano le mie parole di sangue, the tale of seven days of siege, experienced by the protagonist within a semi-destroyed housing estate in Mitrovica, is rhythmically marked by the reproduction of some manuscript pages. h ey are handwritten notes, diffi cult to read, thick with deletions and underscores; some words or sentences from the manuscript reappear in the body of the novel. If on the one hand these insertions, together with the initial table of contents,6 mark some distance and resist the assimilation of the event with the narrative, on the other hand they produce an eff ect of potent reality within the text. In other words, the reader does not quite know whether to assign them to the actual experience of the extra-textual author, or to the fi ctional author within the textual simulacrum. h e result is the creation of an ‘undiff erentiated referential area’, opening on to a direct image of the times. h e page introducing the sixth day is exemplary: at one point, the ink in the author’s pen dries up, prompting her to continue with another, with a thinner stroke. Here, despite the incorporation of a real document, it is diffi cult to assert that Sappiano le mie parole di sangue off ers an easily ‘readable’ representation of the real.

In all these instances, the eff ect of realism consists in an appropriation of reality – which is fi ltered through language and thus transformed into text. Rather than using the term ‘realism’, however, this kind of possibility is better referred to by a less ambiguous term, ‘textualization of the real’.7 h e identifi cation and the construction of the real, within the text, are not defi ned by assuming a material universe that is external to language and textuality to be their starting point; rather, they operate within a semiotic continuum, a socio-cultural space that makes social life, made of relationships and communication, possible.8 Within this space, narrative objects elaborate discursive strategies to construct a ‘fi eld of the real’, the cultural dimension implicated in language, circumscribed only in relation to a certain community and historical epoch. What I defi ne as ‘fi eld of the real’ is no other than the assemblage of constructive possibilities of language, within our cultural codes.

h us, the ‘textualization of the real’ belongs to each and every order of textuality; it is identifi able by taking language as a starting point, and considering the ways it constructs the objects and forms of experience. h e modes of manifestation of language within the text, off er a ‘model’ of reality, and also aff ect the projection of an external universe

Unidentifi ed narrative objects 43

of reference. Textualization may bear upon the ways and forms of realist writing (understood as codes and styles), and even more so upon the strategies employed by the text to interrogate documents and sources belonging to a specifi c cultural fi eld (the semiosphere), thus creating a thick web of intertextual cross-references.

My intention is not to identify a given set of evaluative criteria, or at least, not at the outset. Rather, my aim is to develop certain formal criteria. h e fi rst step in that direction is to identify a locus to work on and to verify some hypotheses – namely, a novel to be dealt with as an object that ‘makes’ theory, and also to be employed as a tool to read other novels. Defi ning a work as a ‘theoretical object’ enables us to observe it as a more or less dissimulated mise-en-scène of its own foundational theoretical principles. If it is accepted that every literary text must contain some indexes of its own theory, an eff ective analytical strategy would be to unpick the theoretical substance of the work, developing analytical and terminological tools with which to bring its contents to the surface.9

Clearly, a method such as this involves some risk, since it may ask the works analysed to say more than they could autonomously say, and almost certainly more than the authors intended. Yet, this should not prevent scholars from attempting to construct a theoretical apparatus capable of questioning the works and obtaining responses. After all, no novel speaks on its own and in explicit terms. First, though, they need be constituted as ‘theoretical objects’, whether explicitly or not. In what follows I attempt to start the process of theoretical construction of a popular novel, Saviano’s Gomorra.

My choice of Gomorra does not mean that I think it is stylistically superior to any other works, but rather refl ects its exemplary form. h is means that I consider Saviano’s novel as a literary phenomenon with a characteristic form, which is articulated through specifi c fi gures. By way of a process of mutual interconnected functionality, those fi gures give rise to narrative forms that appear to be similar. h ere is therefore no need to identify a single, ‘right and true’ form, from which all others may derive like parts of a corollary. Rather, at least one form can be identifi ed. Taking this as a starting point, a series of connections between Gomorra and other New Italian Epic novels can be established, placing them, as Benjamin (1997: 87) would have it, ‘in costellazione’ [‘in a constellation’] – thus gaining a perspective within which to locate a set of problematics. It would be impossible to be exhaustive, even if I broadened the scope of my analysis to more than these texts. Hence, I now turn to establish a set of elements that other critics, using diff erent methods and objectives, might eventually go on to develop.

Notes for a rhetorical typology: grafts, drawings and inserts in Roberto Saviano’s Gomorra

Rather than looking to literary theory, I would suggest that fi lm theory off ers tools to help us comprehend the narrative strategies through which Gomorra seizes the real and then returns it to the cultural universe with a surplus of meaning. In his last work, Marco Dinoi, a recently deceased young scholar of fi lm theory, attempted to articulate ‘una tipologia empirica delle tracce del passato storico che un testo

Dimitri Chimenti44

fi lmico può utilizzare al suo interno’ (Dinoi 2008: 176) [‘an empirical typology of those traces of the historical past that a fi lmic text may employ within itself’]. Dinoi analyses Buongiorno notte (2003) [Good Morning, Night] by Marco Bellocchio, a fi lm that raises theoretical questions analogous to those I have discussed in relation to New Italian Epic. He identifi es three fi gures through which a text may capture and inhabit the historical past: graft, drawing and insert. h is typology is surely partial and – most relevantly – conceived for a medium that functions with technical modalities that can only be metaphorically transposed to literature. Nonetheless, by focusing on narrative, and with some adjustment, I will demonstrate that this typology proves useful for my purposes.

Of Dinoi’s three fi gures, the graft recurs most often, and belongs to the tradition of the historical novel in general. h e term refers to those narrative situations that focus on historical events and recontextualize their meaning. To have a graft, though, history must not be reduced to a mere backdrop of the scene, nor should it be manipulated by the text. Rather, the recontextualization of the past happens because of a development of parallel plots and autobiographical elements, or by the matching of apparently distant and autonomous events through a narrative or dramaturgic strategy. It is of no consequence whether the grafted material derives from the writer’s imagination, from his or her personal life, or from research in the fi eld – usually, it is a mixture of the three. Rather, it is important that some purely textually construed sequences should act upon the narration of real events and characters.

Gomorra employs such grafts in a systematic manner, but, because of Saviano’s remarkable dissimulation of the process, the literariness of his work has sometimes escaped critical attention. Yet misreadings can be illuminating, as in the example of Rachel Donadio, former contributor to the book review section of the New York Times:

Some anecdotes are suspiciously perfect – the tailor who quits his job after seeing Angelina Jolie on television at the Oscars wearing a white suit he made in a Camorra sweatshop; the man who loves his AK-47 so much he makes a pilgrimage to Russia to visit its creator, Mikhail Kalashnikov. Did the author change any names? If so, readers aren’t informed. h ese are not small matters, and should have been disclosed. (Donadio 2007)

h e ‘suspicious’ anecdotes mentioned here are in fact grafts. Donadio addresses a major question when she points at the passage between textual and extra-textual references. She, however, chose to read Gomorra not quite as a novel, focusing on purely event-based referentiality. In other words, the work is criticized for not confi rming itself as a mirror of reality.

Even more so than the lived experience of his characters, Saviano himself (or rather, his textual simulacrum) is grafted, as an ever present narrative ‘I’: ‘Al porto ci andavo per mangiare il pesce’ (Saviano 2006: 17) [‘I often went to the docks to eat fi sh’]; ‘Al funerale di Emanuele c’ero stato’ (32) [‘I had been to Emanuele’s funeral’]; ‘Frequentavo Secondigliano da tempo’ (74) [‘For a long time, I would hang out in Secondigliano’]; ‘Stavo per andarmene dal luogo dell’agguato a Carmela

Unidentifi ed narrative objects 45

attrice’ (114) [‘I was about to go to where Carmela Attrice was ambushed’]. h ese entrance points signal a passage between the historical world, autonomous from and preceding the text, and the world constructed within the novel, which textualizes the real by means of literary praxis. h us, Gomorra’s readers journey through the events by following parallel routes. If at times they come across a path that is recorded in real-life documents, at others they take some distance and open themselves to imagination and literary creation.10

h e protagonists Pasquale and Mariano are fi ctional characters, not just because they do not really exist; their experiences almost certainly belong to real individuals. Rather, what forms them as characters is not the same documentary material that constitutes characters like Francesco Schiavone or Cosimo Di Lauro.11 From the outset, Pasquale and Mariano are subjected to the needs of the text, thus becoming functional within the interstitial space between reality and its representation.

As Donadio’s review demonstrates, a graft thus allows for some mediation between the two planes, installing textual meanings upon real events. In other words, the testimony of certain characters begins from the text, intersects the territories of the real, and comes back once again to the text. h is device, capturing events and characters, is employed in the famous sequence she mentions of Angelina Jolie’s white dress. In order to function, a graft requires entry and exit points, continuous cross-references and juxtapositions between text and history. In the Kalashnikov chapter (177–205), Mariano alternates between the bar – a textual locus – and Mikhail Kalashnikov’s home, the latter being, presumably, a real place. To dissimulate the graft, Mariano is reduced to a recorder-character; he becomes pure gaze, detachable from its own bearer, and available for the reader to appropriate. In fact, Kalashnikov’s home is not described in Mariano’s words, but in a video he himself had recorded. We will never fi nd out whether the walls of Kalashnikov’s house are really plastered with copies of Vermeers and with pictures of children bearing his own name, or whether Mariano (or anyone else) may have eaten buff alo mozzarella cheese with the old general. Here we see how graft can mutate its own form, giving rise to a second fi gure, the insert. h is object, although linking itself to offi cial history, does not pre-exist the narrative.

h e graft moves parallel to textualized events and characters, thus operating an eff ect of indirect meaning upon them. h e insert, however, manipulates them directly, within the text. Simply put, the insert always introduces a fi ctional character or element, which serves to advance the text towards the articulation of the narrative.12 Although the video shot by Mariano may display the same modalities with which it would have been produced in reality, it also contains elements created from within the text. For example, Mariano himself, a fi ctional character bent towards the narrative needs of the novel, enters the frame and shares a table with Kalashnikov.

h e third fi gure of this typology is the drawing. h is term relates to objects that appear just as they are in history, that is, texts that are autonomous from the narrative, and that may be immediately recognized as such by the reader. In Saviano’s novel, these include letters from Don Peppino Diana,13 newspaper articles, interrogation fi les, wire-tapping. On the one hand, the drawing is a document connecting the literary text with a particular historical time, thus confi guring the narrative in a realistic way.

Dimitri Chimenti46

On the other hand, it interacts with the other two fi gures (graft and insert), expanding its own meaning beyond the limits of documentation. A good example of this is the brief sequence of real text-messages exchanged between Francesco Venosa (a youth connected to the Spagnoli clan) and Anna, his girlfriend (99ff ).

h ese discursive excerpts not only inform us about the inner dynamics of clan confl ict, but also narrate the tale, factual and archetypical at the same time, of a youth aware of being chained to his own inescapable destiny. In other words, a document becomes a drawing only when it is made to interact with other elements, to ensure the occurrence and amplifi cation of its meanings. Because of such interaction, while maintaining the literary quality of the document, the drawing becomes open to symbolic interaction with the text. Although the archival document seems merely to have an informative value, and thus is deprived of any aesthetic quality, Gomorra shifts the stress on its symbolic value, through an enquiry-narrative that blurs the distinction between narrated material and narrative device.

A graft often originates from a drawing. h e phone-tapping episode, where there is talk of testing heroin on human guinea pigs, is a case in point. From here one of the most successful sequences in the work unfolds, in which the protagonist witnesses the test on the ‘Visitors’.14 Although the narrative moment is marked by raw realism, its realistic eff ect is amplifi ed by dissimulation: the proximity of drawing (phone tapping) and graft (the witnessing sequence) masks the passage from the archival, extra-textual dimension to the narrative dimension of the text.

As we have seen, a graft must also off er an escape route, to allow for the uninterrupted circuit of meanings from one plane to the next. h rough a constant game of double bets, Gomorra constructs much of its own narrative dynamics. Pasquale, the truck-driver who is no longer a tailor, represents the escape route, not only by transporting the protagonist away from the scene, but also because his words collate textual and extra-textual referents, placing the narrative once again on the plane of historical events: ‘Poi mi fi ssò e disse: “A Secondigliano le cose stanno per andare male […] ‘a vicchiarella’ è in Spagna, con i soldi di tutti. Devi smettere di girare da queste parti, sento la tensione ovunque. Pure il catrame mo si stacca da terra per andare via di qua…”’ (Saviano 2006: 86) [‘He then stared at me and said: “In Secondigliano things are about to go bad […] ‘the old lady’ is in Spain, with everyone’s money. You must stop hanging out here, I feel tension everywhere. Now, even the tar comes off the ground and the leaves…”’]. h is procedure is analogous to but reversed from the one observed above. Just as the drawing had repercussions for the graft, now the graft is linked back to events and characters:

Più Pasquale segnalava la pericolosità della situazione, più mi convincevo che non era possibile non tentare di comprendere gli elementi del disastro. [...] Raff aele Amato ‘a vicchiarella’, il responsabile delle piazze spagnole, un dirigente del secondo livello del clan, era fuggito a Barcellona con i soldi della cassa dei Di Lauro. (Saviano 2006: 86)

[h e more Pasquale signalled the danger of the situation, the more I was convinced it would be impossible not to try and understand the elements of this disaster. (...) Raff aele

Unidentifi ed narrative objects 47

Amato ‘the old lady’, responsible for the Spanish squares, a second-degree manager in the clan, had fl ed to Barcelona with the money from Di Lauro’s chest.]

We may thus understand how graft, insert and drawing not only anchor the text to the historical world; they also install a new cognitive function upon the text-message, the cadastral data, the wire-tapping and the newspaper articles. h e document undergoes a conversion, from archival object into object of memory.

Conclusion: the double-track in the historical novelh e cognitive work required by a text like Gomorra consists in an operation of cross-reading archival materials, not only documents against other documents, but also against their underlying discursive strategies. h is is quite diff erent from the playful and arguably gratuitous intertextuality sought after by contemporary critics and yesterday’s supporters of postmodernism alike. h e novels Gomorra, Asce di guerra, Dies irae and Sappiano le mie parole di sangue are all traversed and sustained by some ethical tension, comparable to what we may fi nd in the works of Pier Paolo Pasolini or Leonardo Sciascia. Such tension prompts a search for knowledge, and for the words and rhetorical forms to tell it. h e imbrication of these two eff ects can help identify how narrative objects ‘make theory’. Here the delineation of a double track in historical novels can be identifi ed, namely, the development of two distinct methods of enquiry, whose overlap gives rise to the narrative. Such typology is not meant to suggest that there are two autonomous forms in the novel, which work together and defi ne themselves through mutual interaction. Rather, it off ers a method of interpretation.

h e fi rst track is ‘narrative’: it may re-propose, in the novel’s own terms, a documented historical fact, or, it may follow an unusual path, defi ning itself within a project of revisionism and counter-information. h e second track has a more ‘analytical’ trait. Rather than try to reach any factual truth, it reworks the manner of its streaming; it questions the archival objects (newspapers, television shows, books, etc.) that pass through, surround or hide the fact. It purports to fi nd not so much a clue, but rather a testimonial ‘trace’, of those discursive strategies that legitimize a certain state of things. Narrative objects may present us with facts, by means of a literary operation as a springboard – to throw the reader into a reality, which can be verifi ed only outside the text. Nonetheless, they prompt their readers to observe the ways in which such reality is constructed within the text itself, disclosing the rhetorical and ideological strategies that convey the meaning of the events, and preside over their retention and management in society outside the text.

h e archival gaze bifurcates, then, to merge again in a reading of the real, which is capable of explicating the discursive layers from the past, as well as their power to act upon the present, directing it and decreeing the relevance of certain events, the better to hide others. From this perspective, the representation of the economic system in Gomorra, icons from the 1980s in Dies irae, and the codes presiding over the media/political apparatus in Sappiano le mie parole di sangue and Asce di guerra,

Dimitri Chimenti48

are all diff erent ways to ‘textualize’ the past. Such past weighs upon the shoulders of the present, even though we are unable to bring it to a fi nal resolution.

h e literature under consideration in this article carries within itself an inescapable ethical and political demand that is rooted in our epoch: at a time when the assemblage of information we have about the cultural meanings of the present and the past seems limited to a sum of disrupted elements and events, the work of digging in the archive operated by these novels, and the set of connections they establish, gives rise to a mythopoetic operation, a ‘memorifi cation’ of the past capable of giving ‘depth’ to the present.

Notes 1. All translations from Italian into English are my own. 2. h e recurrent use of deictic words in all these texts is especially signifi cant here. 3. Parataxis: the placing of clauses or phrases one after another, without words to indicate

coordination or subordination. Hypotaxis: the subordination of one clause to another (New Oxford Dictionary).

4. h ese codes are capable of producing both the messages as well as the manner of their own comprehension.

5. h e well episode is also analysed by Claudia Boscolo in this issue (29). 6. h e fi rst page of Sapiano is a table of contents wherein the author lists the percentages of

truth, imagination and collective imaginary that constitute the novel. 7. h is term is taken from Maurizio Grande (2002), a scholar of cinematography. Grande

conceptualizes the ‘textualization of the real’ with an obvious reference to cultural semiotics, and to the work Juri Lotman in particular (see Lotman and Uspenskij 1995; Ivanov et al. 1980).

8. h is resembles the defi nition of semiosphere off ered by Lotman (2005), analogous to the scientifi c concept of biosphere. h e meaning of ‘semiosphere’ in Lotman seems to be a translation in semiotic terms of what is called ‘culture’ in common language.

9. h e idea of a ‘theoretical object’ comes from scholarship on history and semiology of the arts: Hubert Damisch, Daniel Arasse, Jean Petitot, Omar Calabrese and other scholars linked to the Centre d’Histoire et h éorie de l’Art of Paris (CETHA) (see Damisch 1972; Arasse 1997; Petitot 1992; Calabrese 2006). From this concept follows a methodology yet to be explored for the study of literature, but eliciting important discussions within art history studies. I primarily wish to explore the heuristic possibilities this methodology may off er, when applied to the study of literary texts.

10. Such procedure is at times quite open: as in the case of the sequence in which the characters Romeo and Giuseppe are killed. From this perspective, the presence of the verb ‘to imagine’ is signifi cant: ‘Me li immaginavo sui motorini tirati al massimo, ripassarsi i passaggi salienti dei fi lm, i momenti in cui quelli che contano devono piegarsi all’ostinazione dei nuovi eroi’ (Saviano 2006: 279) [‘I imagined them on their scooters full throttle, going through important passages in the movies, the moments when those who count must bend under the obstinacy of new heroes’]; it points to the fundamental role that literary imagination plays in realizing the world. Only in this manner can Saviano direct the reader’s gaze where it cannot follow, and this is the ‘strongest’ testimonial position taken by the narrating ‘I’ in Gomorra: without being documentary, it makes us sure ‘di una certezza che non potrà mai avere alcun tipo di conferma’ (Saviano 2006: 279) [‘with a certainty that will never have any confi rmation whatsoever’].

11. Francesco Schiavone and Cosimo Di Lauro are leading fi gures in the Neapolitan Camorra (a Mafi a-like organization). Both of them were arrested after several years as fugitives.

Unidentifi ed narrative objects 49

12. Wu Ming’s and Ravagli’s Asce di guerra is the novel that employs the ‘insert’ most often: the relationship between the Carabinieri marshal, Gavino Garau, the memorial of tenant Alberto Rizzi, the retraction of Gerardo Beltrami, a witness for the prosecution, are all cases of ‘insert’. h e clearest instance of how an insert may work is perhaps the inclusion of the article in the Giornale Dell’Emilia dealing with the marshal’s death at the hand of the character Soviet. Surely such an article does not exist – Soviet and Garau are fi ctional characters – but Giornale Dell’Emilia was an actual newspaper (now known as Il Resto Del Carlino).

13. Father Peppino Diana was an anti-Mafi a priest shot to death, in his church, while he was preparing to celebrate Mass. Father Diana had been known as a campaigning cleric since he issued a letter in late 1992 urging his parishioners to shun the Camorra and seeking the support of other priests.

14. h e ‘Visitors’, from the eponymous TV show of the 1980s, were reptilian humanoids who disguise themselves to look human. In Gomorra, drug dealers use the term ‘Visitors’ for the heroin addicts they use to test drug composition. In this case the term ‘Visitor’ signifi es ‘non-human’.

Works citedArasse, Daniel (1997) Le Détail: pour une histoire rapprochée de la peinture (Paris: Flammarion).Benjamin, Walter (1997) Sul concetto di storia, ed. Gianfranco Bonola, trans. Michele

Ranchetti (Turin: Einaudi).——— (1999) Il dramma barocco tedesco, introd. Giulio Schiavoni, trans. Flavio Cuniberto

(Turin: Einaudi).Calabrese, Omar (2006) Come si legge un’opera d’arte (Milan: Mondadori Università).Damisch, Hubert (1972) h éorie du nuage de Giotto à Cézanne: pour une histoire de la peinture

(Paris: Seuil).Dinoi, Marco (2008) Lo sguardo e l’evento, introd. Stefano Jacoviello (Florence: Le Lettere).Donadio, Rachel (2007) ‘Underworld’, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/25/books/review/

Donadio-t.html?pagewanted=all [accessed 18 January 2010].Genna, Giuseppe (2006) Dies irae (Milan: RCS Libri). Grande, Maurizio (2002) La commedia all’italiana, ed. and introd. Orio Caldiron (Rome:

Bulzoni).Ivanov, Vyacheslav Vsevolodovich, Jurij M. Lotman, Aleksandr Moiseevic Pjatigorskij,

Vladimir Nikolaevič Toporov and Boris A. Uspenskij (1980) Tesi sullo studio semiotico della cultura, ed. Maurizio Grande, trans. Antonella Summa (Parma: Pratiche Editrice).

Jones, Babsi (2007) Sappiano le mie parole di sangue (Milan: Rizzoli). Lotman, Jurij M. (2005) ‘On the semiosphere’, trans. Wilma Clark, in Sign Systems Studies

33.1, 215–39.——— and Boris A. Uspenskij (1995) Tipologia della cultura, ed. Remo Faccani, trans.

Marzio Marzaduri (Milan: Bompiani).Petitot, Jean (1992) Physique du sens: de la théorie des singularités aux structures semio-narratives

(Paris: Éditions du Centre National de la Recherche Scientifi que).Saviano, Roberto (2006) Gomorra: viaggio nell’impero economico e nel sogno di dominio della

camorra (Milan: Mondadori).Wu Ming (2009) New Italian Epic: letteratura, sguardo obliquo, ritorno al futuro (Turin:

Einaudi).——— and Vitaliano Ravagli (2005) Asce di guerra, 2nd edn (Turin: Einaudi).

FilmographyBellocchio, Marco (dir.) (2003) Buongiorno notte.