“These fragmented deaths recurring through the space of life like mournful rhymes”. Essay on Alberto Savinio's interstitial metaphysics

Abstract

The text analyzes a specific part of Alberto Savinio's very rich production, focusing in particular on three works: Narrate, uomini, la vostra storia, Maupassant e l’altro, Nuova Enciclopedia. The essay seeks to develop a set of interconnected reflections having as their thematic center the notion of metaphysics, which Savinio continued to investigate for years, always choosing different perspectives to focus on its many aspects. In the first section, after a careful contextualization of the issue, the essay will focus on a series of texts drawn from the nonfiction production. Here some structures of the Italian writer's mental and creative universe will be considered, such as, for example, that negative gnoseology that characterizes his writing, belonging to the dimension of the unconceptualizable. In the second section, a comparison between the lives of Gemito and Maupassant will be proposed. The biographies of these two artists will be studied in the light of a cross-reading aimed at identifying the method of investigation that Savinio employs to penetrate the lives of characters seen as key-figures to illustrate some typical elements of his own poetic vision. The third section will focus entirely on the original idea of the Encyclopedia that Savinio elaborates since the 1940s, often resorting to forms and modules proper to many examples of fantastic literature. That is why the article focuses especially on a headword such as /giostra/, in order to show the way in which the Italian writer works in the thickness of language to bring out its reposed potential for inventiveness.