La farmacia degli incurabili. Da Collodi a Calvino (review)

In the arena of contemporary critical theory, which seems to have buried deconstruction together with its founder, Federica Pedriali's book resurrects a Derridian approach to literature, and, with remarkable insight, re-reads the works of major Italian writers of the last two centuries.

Previously published separately as individual essays (two of which were, respectively, the winner of the 2005 "Nuove Lettere" Award and second prize in the 2006 "Mario Soldati" International Award), the seven chapters collected in this volume allow readers to appreciate the continuity in the author's interpretive endeavors. Skillfully and elegantly dealing with nineteenth- and twentieth-century cultural paradigms, and equally at ease with diverse literary genres and modes (fiction, poetry, essay, autobiography, epistolary writing), Pedriali adopts Derridian ambivalent concepts (such as trace, mark, supplement, pharmakon) to question many of the standpoints of traditional criticism. Through the transgressive lens of deconstruction, she also revisits "Italianness" as a problematic singularity, specifically in those authors traditionally presented as expressions of a literary canon that purportedly defines the national cultural identity.

In the chapter on Collodi, for instance, Pedriali's thought-provoking argumentation revisits pivotal episodes from Pinocchio—the nineteenth-century work of fiction proverbially associated with the creation of a value system, a behavioral code and a cultural standard for the newly unified Italian peninsula—to undermine its social and moral message. The chapter lays bare the aporias in Geppetto's and Pinocchio's respective discourses, challenging the binary opposition that the story is traditionally said to uphold between unconditional, self-sacrificing paternal love and an ungrateful filial rebelliousness that can only be redeemed by recognizing the father's values and by submitting to his authority. Pedriali reveals a Pinocchio built upon drives, prohibitions, threats and obligations that, rather than conferring humanity on the young protagonist in order to deliver him from his (real and metaphorical) puppet condition, in fact annihilate him, framing him into a phony bourgeois identity that produces new generations more sensitive to categorical imperatives than to expressions of affection.

The chapter on Calvino's Invisible Cities takes us to a post-structuralist world in which a deconstructive reading may be less surprising (without being banal) than it appeared to be in Collodi's nineteenth-century context. Attention to the blurring of distinctions between textual sources leads Pedriali to a witty discussion of interpretation as a game of potentialities shared by both Polo and Calvino.

From postmodernism back to realism, the subsequent treatment of Verga revolves around mimesis and impersonality. Attention to stylistic idiosyncrasies brings to the foreground the anxieties and hesitations in Verga's poetics, precariously negotiating between two poles: on the one hand, a painstaking loyalty to a narrative method that, in the footsteps of French naturalism, should purportedly guarantee a zero-degree adherence to the real, and, on the other hand, the implosion of truthful representation.

Likewise, hunger as the structural and thematic unit in the chapter on Gadda triggers an exploration of identity as difference and écart (at once divergence, gap, residue, and remainder—all conceptual references to the impossibility of totality, closure and singularity). The motif of the voracity of writing and of the writer—we understand—is not a remedy for the difformity, imperfection, and incompleteness of the "I": in fact it leads neither to the assimilation of difference nor to the consolidation of self-sameness.

Through an analysis of the intertextual references to the female figure of Clizia, the chapter on Montale—the most traditional chapter of the book from a stylistic point of view—reassesses the poet's use of the "woman" motif and his view on the status of poetry in Le occasioni. Directly engaging with previous criticism, Pedriali aims to show that Clizia's presence is far more pervasive in Montale's collection than has been claimed so far, at once as the embodiment of temporality and as its own resistance, at the crossroads of life and death.

Trespassing is also central to the chapter on Svevo, where it connotes the...