'IN REALTA' IL MARE È MUTEVOLISSIMO'. CASSOLA NARRATORE ESISTENZIALE (1937-1970)

Assumed to be a traditional writer supporting a narrative affected by "crepuscular anguish",Cassola has been firmly put out or, at best, on the fringes of the twentieth-century canon: this is overtly witnessed by school manuals of literary history. In fact, contemporary and, by habits, present-day criticism intended to see Cassola as the proponent of a sort of literary elegiac idyll, full of good feelings, content of the consolations of a quiet life. Far from it, his work is permeated by a profound unease, a sharp perception of the difficulty of living, even and particularly at the level of the most banal daily life. It seems, therefore, quite advisable to refocus Cassola’s position within historiographical canonizations and hierarchies of literary values, as well as to free this writer from the misunderstanding that he himself, with his late poetic declarations, has helped fuel. Decisive steps in each of these directions has been made by a few critics in recent years. The present work, although in the wake of these contributions and being, therefore, largely indebted to them, aims at opening new hermeneutic routes. A particular form of commitment, which I call "humanitarian", is here proposed as the unifying element of the entire journey of the writer: this view enables to explain, or even necessitates, both his poetic choices and the evolution of his work at a technical-formal level, from the slender and thin tales marking out his debut to the wide-ranging novels of his artistic maturity. The first part of this research, dedicated primarily to clarify the premises of Cassola’s poetics, is followed by an overall description of his existentialist fiction, from the first "raccontino" "Paura e tristezza", published in 1937, to the eponymous novel of 1970. Text analysis is carried out on three fundamental levels: the macro-structures of plot; the configuration of the narrator; the chrono-spatial coordinates. The choice of cross-reading Cassola’s existentialist production, overally treated rather than work by work, derives from the observation that, already at the moment of his first collection of tales, "La visita" (1942), the writer had largely defined the structures characteristic of his fiction, which remain essentially unchanged even after his passage to longer stories and full-length novels.