EVASIONI ALLO SPECCHIO: EVOLUZIONE E ASPETTI DELLA NARRATIVA DI ARTURO LORIA DAI PRIMI INEDITI A "LA SCUOLA DI BALLO"

The stories written by Arturo Loria (1902-1957) in the first half of the Twenties are mostly inedited and little studied. Through their analysis, therefore, I aim at presenting the first comprehensive research on the development of his narrative from his debut until the publication of his third and last volume, “La scuola di ballo”. The first of the three periods in which I have divided his oeuvre comprises seventeen stories written between the end of 1920 and the middle of 1922. Displaying homogeneous characters and situations and a pervasive rhetoric of excess and delirium that connects Loria's work to the melodrama and the Gothic tales, these stories reveal in their succession a conscious design of the writer. Since the very beginning his art seems to be retreated into itself thus mirroring its condition in society. Between 1922 and 1926, Loria develops his narrative in a coherent way. His stories are characterized by a growing process of desublimation that eventually leads to the picaresque tales of “Il cieco e la Bellona”. At the same time, he also experiments new solutions and different narrative genres. The second chapter, divided into three parts, is dedicated to the analysis of the genesis and structure of the collections: “Il cieco e la Bellona” (1928), “Fannias Ventosca” (1929) and “La scuola di ballo” (1932). The study of archive material (edited and inedited) gives information on the volumes that is largely unknown. The analysis of the structure, for example, demonstrates that Loria aimed at creating a cohesive work: “books of stories”, and not simple anthologies. This hypothesis seems to find evidence in the transformation that the texts undergo in the passage from review to volume. Building up thick plots of connections among the different stories and giving importance to their disposition, Loria uses the structure of his work as a rhetoric device to direct the attention of the reader towards certain aspects of his narration. He also uses it to multiply and deepen the symbolic scope of his stories. Moreover, the study on the genesis of the publications leads to the identification of two distinct phases of the Lorian narrative in “Il cieco e la Bellona” and in “La scuola di ballo”, with “Fannias Ventosca” being the collection of transition. The object of the third chapter is the in-depth analysis of the evolution of the narrative and of the poetics of the author. In it I consider the way in which similar situations and characters, in particular the meeting between the protagonist and an old lady, are repeated over and over again. The comparison of analogous elements in texts belonging to different phases highlights that this repetitive duress is referable only in part to an obsessive matrix. Indeed, the reiteration of elements often reveals the high degree of awareness with which Loria reflected on his stories and on himself through them. It is a stratagem to enshrine in his volumes both his autobiography and the “biography” of his writing technique. This incessant reflection is related ultimately to the modern conscience of the crisis of the subject and of reality: a crisis that in the first half of the Twenties manifests itself mainly in the refusal of it, while in the second phase it assumes the form of an unsolved dialectic between enchantment and disenchantment. It is possible to find Utopian nostalgia and cruel observation of the evil especially in the ambiguous relationships that the narrators build with the grotesque characters and with the eccentric events that involve them. At a certain point, however, the adventurous plots of “Il cieco e la Bellona” disappear and the author focuses his attention on the sensations and the impressions of characters paralyzed by a castrating awareness of their own self. In the fourth and last chapter I ponder some aspects of the evolution of his narrative mode to show how over the three volumes the voice of the narrator becomes less and less audible and how the diegesis shifts decisively into mimesis. Additionally, I underline how the modernity of contents is not mirrored in the forms of expression. Unable to conceive his own art if not in ways which Loria himself perceived as non-topical, with his stories the author seems to have constantly given life to metaphors of crisis.