Disarticolazioni e sopravvivenze. La trama nel romanzo modernista italiano

According to a widespread commonplace, modernist authors are allegedly not interested in plot construction. This lack of interest is indeed well exemplified by Virginia Woolf, but it is actually an exception; both in English modernism and in the rest of Europe, the plot is not really seen as an ‘aesthetic deadweight’ (Ortega y Gasset), but rather as a problem. The case of Italian modernism is particularly meaningful in this respect. Only Tozzi (especially in his early works) rejects the need for a well-constructed plot, and refuses to establish links between events. Pirandello, by contrast, often indulges in novelistic conventions, which he uses as a second-hand repertoire; at the same time, he disrupts the story through digression or essayistic reflection. Even Svevo does not refrain from dramatic plot twists: he rather chooses to disrupt narration, and to create a second novel underlying the plot of Zeno’s Conscience – i.e. the novel of Zeno’s unconscious, which provides the narrated events with a meaning unknown to the narrator himself. Lastly, since his early works, Gadda opts for the ‘novelistic novel’, precisely in opposition to modernist psychologism; but being himself a modernist, he does not only restore the plot as a way to capture the complexity of reality – he also complicates the plot to the point of implosion. Despite their individual differences, Italian modernists restore the melodramatic plot structures that had been stigmatized by Naturalism; but at the same time they expose such plot structures as artificial constructions, where the relation between events and meaning remains an uncertain and complicated one.