Impossibile chiusura: il romanzo moltiplicato

Abstract

“In the fundamental relationship with themselves”, Musil writes in The Man Without Qualities, “all men are narrators. They like the ordered chain of facts since it looks like a necessity, and thanks to the impression that life has its “course” they feel somehow protected from chaos”. Nonetheless, there are some moments in cultural history in which human beings lose the thread of their account, and with it the possibility to bring back the chaos of reality to a sensible “narrative order”. Twentieth-century great literature gave voice to this apprehension, showing the obsessive though ruinous attempts to translate in a narrative form the “conscience of complexity”, which Gadda describes as the perception of an increasingly stratified, multiple and inexhaustible reality. Theoretical paradoxes, structural inventions and stylistic options led several writes to “multiply” the novel in order to reproduce, within the closed perimeter of the written page, the elusive multiplicity of the real world (and its endless fictional doubles). These structures can be chaotic, accumulative, and stratified, or in some other cases they can be organised according to sophisticated geometries which are forced to be fatally open, and to hide faults, lacks, metaphysical voids at the core of the system. If reality cannot close, novel is then doomed to an “impossible conclusion”.