Soglie narrative e fotografiche in “Leggenda privata” di Michele Mari

Abstract

The aim of the paper is to analyze the narrative and photographic thresholds of Leggenda privata by Michele Mari (2017). The first case is a rhetorical artifice, a horror-gothic-fantastic narrative threshold, that Mari creates to distinguish the present of writing from the past of memories, intended, as I will try to demonstrate, to problematize the crucial questions of autobiography: incipit and explicit of the narration, literature and bios, fiction and non-fiction. Mari adds another expedient to this one: the inclusion of family photographs, selected from his personal archive, and that, for the variety of their authors, reveal another threshold, that between the writer and the photographer. A main topic of the theory on the autobiographical phototext is thus proposed, that is the hypothetical identity of the author of the photos and that of the narration, and above all their mutual relationship, played in terms of extraneousness, coincidence or partial overlap. The two thresholds serve to highlight the critical aspects of autobiographical writing and to redefine its scope in an autofictional field, where the frontiers between factual and fictional, on the one hand, and between writing and literary theory, on the other, are destined to dissolve.