Abstrakt: | Paolo Volponi’s last novel, Le mosche del capitale, published in 1989, is considered
by most critics to be the most important novel of the late eighties. It revisits the issues
from the author’s earlier works, for example Memoriale (1962) and Corporale (1974),
and transports the reader into a postindustrial factory world, dealing with the problems
of human beings entangled in the complex and often cruel mechanisms of professional life
in the contemporary world. Human characters are completely devoid of meaning and any
humane dimension. In the pursuit of profit and power, they get so lost that they cease to
be the driving force of narration.
In this dehumanised world the burden of diegesis is placed on personified objects, which
not only talk about the human world from their “inanimate” perspective, but also keep
their distance from that world, which is a prerequisite for a reasonably objective depiction
of its problems. The narrative, told from the perspective of the main protagonist (engineer
Bruto Saraccini), is supplemented by the allegorical characters’ (i.e. objects’ and
environmental phenomena’s) utterances. Therefore, allegory in Volponi’s text becomes
the basic carrier of meaning. It is thanks to allegory that the reader becomes aware of
the void and meaninglessness of the reality in which objects are closer to humanism and
humanity than people themselves. Allegory plays three functions in the novel:
1) interpretative-rhetorical, in which human beings’ traits (vices) are projected onto inanimate
objects, as a result of which the characteristics of the human world become
clearer and more marked;
2) axiological, which explicitly names and establishes the system of values, exposing human
characters’ moral attitudes;
3) mimetic, whose aim is to supplement the description of the world depicted in a situation
in which human characters are not able to provide such a description in a complete
way (e.g. the use of allegorical objects as observers and “narrators” replaces the
characters’ inner monologue). |