Il soprannaturale letterario. Storia, logica e forme by Francesco Orlando (review)

Published posthumously, thanks to the meritorious work of Stefano Brugnolo, Luciano Pellegrini, and Valentina Sturli who transcribed and edited notes and recorded lectures by the Italian scholar Francesco Orlando (1934–2010), Il soprannaturale letterario represents the editorial conclusion of Orlando's long-lasting—and previously unpublished—research on the theme of the literary 'supernatural.' The book is divided into four chapters which illustrate the different modes of expression of the supernatural in literature, trace its transformations throughout history, and attempt at a definition of the logic that lies behind its literary emergence. This last feature ultimately results as crucial in Orlando's work: by exploring the fragile and continuously changing nature of the compromise between reason and imagination that informs the appearance of the supernatural in literature, Orlando's investigation is able to engage the reader, not only in a detailed theoretical systematization of the various forms of the literary supernatural, but also in an implicit reflection on a key aspect of literature as a whole—namely, its manifestation as believable fiction.

Despite being counterbalanced by Orlando's intellectual brilliance and his predilection for typological solutions, the unpolished quality of the materials from which the work is compiled makes the book, at times, both didactic and elusive. The first chapter is already telling, in this sense, as it unfolds in a series of "minimal" examples—as the title claims—which are merely meant to open a general discussion about the notion of supernatural in literature. Forcefully, Orlando is first compelled to confront the concept of literary 'fantastic' as elaborated by Roger Caillois, and, most famously, by Tzvetan Todorov. Yet, the chapter readily moves away from the purpose of giving a complete, preliminary theoretical structure to the book, by proceeding, instead, to the identification of some of the features of the supernatural through the examination of literary texts. Irrespective of differences in genres and times of composition of the works analyzed, Orlando's investigation freely ranges from Dante's Divine Comedy to Borges' The Library of Babel, eventually inferring two characteristics of supernatural literature which will be fully elaborated and tested in subsequent chapters. The supernatural—Orlando claims—is defined by an inner need for rules and limitations to be expressed, on the one hand, and by the fluctuating nature of its relationship with belief and disbelief, on the other.

Building from these early observations, the second chapter moves toward a more systematic approach to the topic. Eight works are selected and examined in chronological order. Beginning with the analysis of the medieval French drama, Le Miracle de Théophile by Rutebeuf, and stretching to the twentieth-century masterpiece by Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis, Orlando outlines a brief history of literary supernatural, and identifies, in example after example, the variations which informed the emergence of this kind of literature and the expectations of the readers in different times and contexts. Albeit implicit, a first typological differentiation is already attempted, at least when Orlando addresses some specific examples: the examination of Cervantes' Don Quijote, Goethe's Faust, and Kafka's work—among the most compelling insights of the entire book—results, in this vein, in a first categorization of the supernatural which culminates with the striking definition of Kafka's abrupt employment of fantastic elements in his work as a literary action comparable to a "punch in the face," or, more elegantly, in Orlando's original version, "un pugno sul tavolo" (80).

This embryonic classification fully develops into a typological system in the third chapter. By revisiting the historical account previously outlined according to the specific parameters of belief and disbelief, Orlando identifies here eight categories of literary supernatural. The 'supernatural of tradition' (in two variants) is the first label employed, and gathers all the manifestations of the supernatural which can be interpreted as literary reifications of the collective imagination, presuming, as such, the reader's instinctive lack of rational...