The Language of Tolerance: Dialogism and Orality in Francesca Duranti's Sogni mancini

After the long predominance of a literary tradition, ¹ modern Western cultures have returned to orality with a 'leap from the being written-oriented to the being oral-oriented.' ² In the case of Italian, such shift 'dalla scritturalità verso l'oralità,' ³ culminating in the Eighties, has led linguists to theorise, on the language continuum, the central varieties of 'italiano dell'uso medio,' ⁴ and 'italiano neo-standard.' ⁵ Moving from the assumption of spoken and written varieties as two opposite poles on a changing continuum, ⁶ rather than clear-cut categories, and from the debate on 'italiano scritto' and 'italiano parlato,' ⁷ which is paralleled by a revival of literary criticism on the present simplification of 'italiano letterario,' ⁸ in this study I will consider the spoken, dialogic style of Duranti's ⁹ fiction, ¹⁰ focusing on her latest novel, Sogni mancini. ¹¹ Duranti's language draws extensively from neo-standard Italian, in syntactic structure, insisted reference to the context (deixis), ¹² marked construction of the sentence (including inversion, focalisation, dislocation), and choice of colloquial vocabulary, juxtaposed to more 'literary' expressions. Such spoken discourse structure, together with the great use of reported speech and of the address to the narratee/reader, forms the marked dialogism and orality ¹³ of the author's texts in a 'style which doesn't seem to be style.' ¹⁴

The dialogic character of Duranti's narrative is inextricably linked with the use of narrator's voice, the paramount theme of writing, ¹⁵ the common practice of intertextuality ¹⁶ and autobiography. ¹⁷ Her passion for narrating, 'telling stories,' ¹⁸ and making a coherent picture, which appears in the recurrent metaphor of geometrical drawings, ¹⁹ is matched by her effort to mould the language of the Italian novel, by changing its 'tendenza alla bella pagina':

noi stiamo costruendo ancora adesso la lingua italiana e la costruiamo già vecchia senza il coraggio di metterla sotto e dire: 'Beh, finalmente la nostra lingua ce l'abbiamo, la possediamo per costruire un romanzo.' [...] La ricerca linguistica che, a mio parere, si impone allo scrittore italiano è quella di sottomettere la lingua (quel 'sottometterla' deve essere inteso nel senso di portare la lingua a un grado compatibile con il racconto), 'toglier[e alla lingua] i vestiti della festa' che normalmente ha quando va sulla carta. L'italiano, quando va nero su bianco, tende ad andare 'in falsetto' e questo va fatto con estrema delicatezza perché non bisogna esagerare. ²⁰

The author's intention to preserve the 'naturalness' of the language (in line with much contemporary narrative) leads her to introduce markedly 'oral' features onto a medium, literary Italian, resulting in a 'contemporary, educated spoken Italian,' ²¹ which is the focus of the present analysis.

Duranti's dialogic style is variously modulated in her eight novels published to date. While the use of spoken (morpho-)syntactic ²² features (such as parataxis, repetition, ellipsis and deixis) and colloquial vocabulary are common to all of her fiction, a markedly regional variety (and, to a lesser extent, dialect) is only employed in her early two novels. In the first one, La Bambina, ²³ dialogism results as the third person child narrator's voice is juxtaposed to her adult perspective, ²⁴ and to her report of family and friends' utterances, in particular the mother's ²⁵ authoritative voice (constituting an interesting example of Bakhtinian plurivocality). ²⁶ While La Bambina successfully creates an effect of child-like language, Piazza mia bella piazza, ²⁷ uses (regional) colloquialisms ²⁸ in rather constructed speech reports, revealing the difficulty of an autobiographic plot. Indeed, the very author has censored her second novel in various interviews and by not allowing its reprint. After her early novels, Duranti reaches success with La casa sul lago della luna, ²⁹ where the 'magic' and literary aura, suspended between reality and fantasy, is supported by a more literary register and...