Voicing the World: Writing Orality in Contemporary Italian Fiction (review)

Marina Spunta. Voicing the World: Writing Orality in Contemporary Italian Fiction is a welcome addition to bibliography on modern Italian literature. The first chapter of this book provides a general framework and is especially valuable as an overview of previous research by its author on orality. Her choice of writers is aimed at underlining the transition from "a stronger impact of orality in the early works of Gianni Celati, Antonio Tabucchi, Francesca Duranti, and Erri De Luca, to a weaker impact of an orality that has become all-pervasive and so less marked in their later works" (19; italics in original). A "more emphatic reproduction of orality" is then studied in the production of Alessandro Baricco and several writers from the 1990s: Rossana Campo, Silvia Ballestra, Aldo Nove, Daniele Del Giudice, Caterina Bonvicini, Andrea De Carlo, and Giulio Mozzi.

The chapter on Gianni Celati (63–108) concentrates on his Cinema Naturale (2001). This book was chosen because its nine short stories provide a vantage point from which to observe the development of orality and of the short story form in the 1980s and 1990s. Marina Spunta pays careful attention to the authors that have shaped Celati's work. She concentrates in particular on Dante, Ariosto, Boiardo, Leopardi, Pasolini, and Calvino, but she does not forget that Celati has been greatly influenced by Anglo-American writers as well. Spunta then analyzes the importance of Celati's work for the younger generation of Italian writers (i.e., Benati, Cavazzoni, Cornia, Palandri, and Tondelli). She argues for "a re-evaluation of Celati's work, as an invaluable reference point in contemporary fiction, particularly in terms of orality, space and vision" (81). She considers the short story "Come sono sbarcato in America" to be one of the best examples of Celati's ability "to create audible and visible tales, which resemble cinema clips" (108).

Since Celati tends to work from the margins, Spunta, in the following two chapters, studies two writers who try to modify the Italian literary canon from the inside, namely Francesca Duranti (109–33) and Antonio Tabucchi (135–63). Even though Duranti and Tabucchi are very different writers, they combine literary tradition with a more modern linguistic approach. Spunta also remarks that critical analyses of Duranti's works have mainly focused on content and themes, and therefore her study of language and the use of spoken Italian shed light on a major aspect of Duranti's work. Spunta points out that Duranti's fiction frequently includes written and spoken language, many dialogues, and reported speech. She resorts to "plot devices, such as the tape-recorder in Effetti personali, or the Dream machine in Sogni mancini, in order to foster the exchange between the text and the reader" (132).

The connection that Spunta establishes between Duranti and Tabucchi (and even Tondelli) is based on their common attempt to lower the literary standard by using orality and neostandard Italian. Their approaches produce different facets of orality. In the case of Tabucchi, Spunta remarks on "his experimentation with reported speech and with silence" (135). At all stages of her discussion, Spunta's explanations are clear and lucid except for an intriguing paragraph where she warns about the possible misunderstanding of Tabucchi's condemnation of lingua di plastica. As Tabucchi explained in an interview from 1994, this is a language that, like some kinds of plastic, cannot be recycled and therefore is not to be read a second time. Tabucchi uses this term to refer to some of the prose that replicates spoken language too closely, but Spunta claims that this is not to be seen as a rejection of orality or neostandard Italian, "but rather as a defense of the Italian literary tradition, notwithstanding his efforts towards innovation" (146). Her argument is important but not always easy to understand since it rests upon analyses of forms of silence, reticence, and ellipsis in Tabucchi's orality that she also equates with the author's reproduction of "the unsaid, the ambiguous, the postmodern...