Gli scartafacci di Vittorio Imbriani. Genetica di una prosa umoristica.

Abstract

Vittorio Imbriani’s drafts. Genetics of a humorous prose. The thesis – organised in three chapters respectively devoted to the aesthetic and philosophical theories, the writing practice and the rhetoric of humor -considers the intellectual experience of Vittorio Imbriani across the entire span of its production highlighting links between his theoretical works and those really artistic. Several critical approaches are used: philological, narratological, stylistic and philosophical. The first part deals with the works about aesthetics and literary criticism, written between 1863 and 1868, Imbriani’s early years in which he exploits De Sanctis’s teachings and philosophical trainings, developing a theory of art (the macchia) and of prose (the ghiribizzo). The second chapter analyzes in detail the ghiribizzo, stylistic paradigm that translates chaos and meandering into narrative syntax, renouncing explicitly all claims of order and rationality, in sharp opposition to both the principles of naturalism and realism and the romantic didactic-allegorical prose. The last section explores the humorous speech, that must be first of all considered as literary form, not only as a gradation of the comic mood. Humour is a rhetorical (or anti-rhetorical) conscious program with specific rules that govern the running of the internal machine. In his prose Imbriani plays customizing -the most typical humorous literary form, the journey, which is both constant fluctuation between different authorship’s 'moods' and sentimental journey to discover the most secret folds of the human soul; journey is also -materially -doodle, pen's travel on the paper, word’s adventure on the sheet. Imbriani’s accession to the modules of humor has philosophical, existential reasons (his perception of humor as a contradiction of reality reproduced in an apparent narrative chaos) and an historical root (the nature of modernity for him is "belligerency"). This construction method is chosen by Imbriani with absolute consistency and awareness: the philological analysis of the author’s variants confirms the trend of a systematic expansion of the text-shirt that responds to a very special instance of mimesis based on the principles of expressionism. The critical outcome which the thesis lands is finally overcoming not only the categories of ‘pique’ and ‘spite’, but most of the critical judgments that have painted Imbriani as an obsessive scholar or as a parodic polemicist and fierce exponent of anti-literature: Imbriani’s irony is obviously humorous, a bitter laugh of a sentimental writer, expression of the intimate and unavoidable dissonance of reality and human soul. The work concludes with two appendices: the first is a bio-bibliographical note that reconstructs the main stages of Imbriani’s intellectual experience, the second offers a transcription of the various drafts of narratives texts on which the study was conducted.