Salvatore Francesco Lattarulo Il coinquilino anonimo: Surrealismo e Vita Condominiale nell’opera Eclettica di Dino Buzzati
The exhibition Dino Buzzati: The surrealism of everyday life, held in Verona in 1994 (catalogue edited by Maria Teresa Ferrari), on the occasion of the seventieth anniversary of the publication of the first Manifesto of Surrealism, fits well the work of the writer from Belluno within the movement officially founded just a century ago by André Breton. The dreamlike atmospheres of his narrative, the space given to the themes of the unconscious, the versatility and eclecticism of his creativity, which contaminates prose with figurative art (the graphic novel), make Buzzati, if not the leader, one of the leading exponents of Italian surrealism. The contributions of scholars such as Contini, Bonifazi, Gallinari, Biondi, Giannetto (quoting just few names) have already partly followed such a research path. At the same time, the surrealist instance does not “separate him from modernist literature, to which Buzzati also belongs”, as Giulio Savelli observes. All this makes the Venetian writer, Milanese by choice, an example of a hybrid voice within literary modernity.
After having focused on the key points of Buzzati’s surrealist poetics, the aim of my paper is to investigate a particular aspect. One of the privileged spaces in Buzzati’s stories to set the theme of the lack of meaning and the hallucinated vision of reality in the existence of the man of our time is the condominium cross-section. In the work of the writer from Belluno (from prose to comics) this special urban habitat becomes an elective place of interior isolation. In these anonymous hives of the current metropolises, which the author sometimes loves to spy on from the outside imagining the flow of ordinary existences, what intervenes to break the squalid monotony of the days is the epiphany of a strange and unexpected event that tears men apart from the circle of ostracism that surrounds their intimacy. Something very similar happens in the paintings of Magritte, Buzzati’s favorite painter and source of inspiration. The underlying message is that the imponderable, in the form of nightmare, coexists with the anguished feeling of estrangement of contemporary man, and has his own unconscious as focus.
Salvatore Francesco Lattarulo. (salvatorefrancescolattarulo@gmail.com). Dottore di Ricerca in Filologia Italiana Contemporanea. Si è occupato in particolare di poesia italiana del Novecento (Risi, Sereni, Montale, Ungaretti, Campana, Penna, Bodini, Saba, Spaziani) pubblicando volumi a tema e saggi in riviste specializzate e miscellanee. In ambito narrativo ha scritto contributi su Svevo, Fenoglio, Malaparte, Pasolini, Bassani, Buzzati. È cultore della materia presso il Dipartimento LELIA dell’ateneo barese. Ha insegnato nel Dipartimento di Italianistica dell’Università di Stettino. Partecipa come relatore a convegni in Italia e all’estero. Su Buzzati si vedano i recenti contributi: «A te convien tenere altro viaggio»: la funzione Dante nelle rotte infernali di Dino Buzzati, in “Revue des études dantesques”, 2023, n° 7, “Lecture et mémoire de Dante entre le XIXe et le XXe siècle”, pp. 77-96; «Da questa città che nessuno di voi conosce, mando notizie»: Dino Buzzati tra ipermondo e oltremondo, in "Lingua, letteratura, storia e cultura italiana. Incontri nello spazio reale, virtuale e immaginario". Atti del Convegno internazionale 2023 dell’Università di Novi Sad (in corso di stampa). Tra i volumi pubblicati cfr.: Verso levante. Un secolo di poesia pugliese (1913-2013), Bari, Stilo, 2014; Le pietre sopra le ali. Vent'anni senza Antonio Verri, Bari, Progedit, 2013; ‘Un poeta “a est d'un parallelo reciso”. Cristanziano Serricchio. Lettere 2002-2011, Fasano, Schena, 2013; Cristanziano Serricchio, "La regina Giovanna. Dramma incompiuto in tre atti", Fasano, Schena, 2013.