Il "passaggio di parole di bocca in bocca" : oralità e estro narrativo nell'opera di Gianni Celati

Abstract

Gianni Celati has often insisted on the fact that we learn the resources of language above all by listening to other people’s voices in daily life; books should be thought of as musical scores that conserve the memory of voices, of intonations, of ways by which narrator and listener can understand one another by ear. In other words the writer must reproduce a sort of fantastic collusion based on imaginative sympathy with the reader. Celati, above all in his later works (Narratori delle pianure of 1985), counters the offi cial distrust of language and deafness to the subtlety of words that are typical of our age through his narratives of the «pilgrim» in the world who transforms travel into a quest. His are «oral» stories, which look back to the ritual form of the old novella; like such works they celebrate hearsay, delicately and effectively reproducing that passage from mouth to mouth that is at the origin of every narrative: without this passage «there is no novella, there is no fable, there are no legends, which are all marvels of hearsay.» This paper proposes to follow and comment on the narrative techniques of Gianni Celati’s later works, offering a representative selection from Narratori delle pianure to Vite di pascolanti (2006).