When horror is existential – Il Sole 24 ORE
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«If only we could revive the ancestral shudder in front of the unknown…», asked Emil Cioran in a focal point of his fourth book, Tears and saints. Not so much the hysterical realism à la Pynchon as the uncanny realism of Bernhard, Ligotti and Danielewski seems perhaps suitable to depict that “panic in front of the indecipherable” which is synonymous with ontological dismay, terror of infinity. In his militant essay, The Literary Horror, published by Italo Svevo Edizioni, Orazio Labbate attempts to put together the pieces of the last forty years of Italian novels through «a critical expression» coined «to collect a literature. Its aim is to deal with the various human perturbations: existential, metaphysical, psychological, supernatural, mythical, with a writing that is never tame – made up of intense and lasting symbolic, stylistic and theological elevation».
Tzvetan Todorov and Francesco Orlando
Labbate’s dioscuri are The Fantastic Literature by Tzvetan Todorov and The Literary Supernatural by Francesco Orlando, two studies capable of notable «interpretative disconnections» that organize the work on the basis of well-circumscribed limits and boundaries. But in Labbate’s Wunderkammer (far from horror proper, that of Poe, to be clear, and closer to a metaphysical “feeling”) there is no lack of suggestions also from Bufalino to Sciascia, Ceronetti.
Divided into three thematic sections – Myth and Gothic, Anxiety and theological-existential horror, Investigative disturbance –, The Literary Horror brings back the “heart” of the reasoning at the end of each single chapter through a paradigmatic citation of the work analysed. The result is an auscultative method of the text which, through overdetermined and suggestive expressive formulas, presents itself as creative literary criticism, on the model of the Fragments of a love speech by Roland Barthes. Thus, for example, we speak of Horcynus Orca by Stefano D’ Arrigo: «A planetary novel in which Sicilian and Italian dialects contrast, fight, with the archetypal mobility of the abstract referents of a mythical imaginary. They give birth to the chilling emotion of a family mirage of a monstrous nature. The linguistic transgression initiates and supports the absolute and tyrannical power of the island myth, never indulging in an average style which, if accepted, would lead to the formation of a great grotesque caricature. Here the style, impervious and literary, is a linguistic code through which the foundation of literary horror is systematically imposed: a brand new radical writing capable of infecting the imagination of the reader with supernatural anxieties and an untouchable past».
There is room in the book for Night timehouse by house by Vincenzo Consolo (“irresponsible secrecy of a style with initiatory intonations”), The ultimate swamp by Giorgio Manganelli («a precious hall of mirrors»), The little monk of Naples by Anna Maria Ortese («romantic variant of the “persecuted family”»), The lies of the night by Gesualdo Bufalino («archaic and sibylline baroque elegance»), The witch and the captain by Leonardo Sciascia («theatrical and documentary narration»), Prague cemetery by Umberto Eco (“a jack-in-the-box full of lugubrious delicacies”) and other novels of equal interest. Ultimately, Labbate’s main objective could lie in a “very personal” poetic recognition of his literary motives, of his activity as a writer by means of models perceived as analogous, necessary, within a larger, osmotic process of self-analysis and sincere literary epistemology.
Orazio Labbate, The literary horror, Italo Svevo Edizioni, «Library of Useless Literature», pag. 128, €15.00
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