Monday 17 September 2018

How to get around the inadequacy of an outdated language

Beppe Fenoglio




This is the second time that I find myself in front of an unexpected situation, which goes under the name of "language", i.e. the lack of an adequate language to describe the past.
The first time was when I was planning to write a novel about the Unification of Italy. Now that I plan to write a novel starting from September 8th, 1943, to nowadays, I feel this difficulty once again.
It is obvious that if you want to write something about the years of war and those immediately after you must read those authors who have (de)scribed that period, but every time you try to read them you fall into linguistic and cultural stereotypes that have formed that Italy, from the post-war period onwards. You experience the unbridgeable distance between today's language and post-war language.
Challenging, aggressive, modern, experimenting the language you use to describe the current reality, monotonous, old, cumbersome, stereotypical, boring themes the language used by post-war writers.
I could say the same things for the contents. Dead, ineffective, almost invalids, those highlighted by writers like Cassola, Fenoglio, Vittorini, but still, to be honest, stronger than those expressed by contemporary literature-meme - which may seem a contradiction but it is not, in how neorealism has however a greater impact of contents than neo-post-realist writers watered down by the prevailing globalism).
The solution I have adopted is then to keep in the book a narrative voice that describes the past from the present, starting from the present versus the past. a Voice able to throw a cone of light, to illuminate the past realities, directly from the present to the past, from a present universe in which the revision takes place, towards the past universes on which revision is operating.
In this way I will be able to filter the past with a modern language, with a modern structure, without depending on past models.

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