Alla ricerca del genere letterario: poetica della mediazione e “narrativa integrale” nella trilogia di Luciano Bianciardi

The paper offers an interpretation of the literary poetics that emerges from Luciano Bianciardi’s trilogy, consisting of the novels Il lavoro culturale, L’integrazione and La vita agra. Starting from the mixture of writing of truth and writing of fiction, examples of the contamination of the literary genre in Bianciardi’s novels are given. The non-fictional digressions are interpreted through the point of view of engagement, as a response to the needs of the age and compromise with the reality. In his novels, Bianciardi provides a vision of a country split in two parts. The author plays the role of difficult mediator on both a social and aestheticliterary level of opposing forces, represented in many cases by secondary characters in the novels, who are used in a dialogic and metaliterary function. The need for mediation is fulfilled in the idea of the integral novel, a narration in which author and reader are directly involved and which at the same time succeeds through the literary devices of compression and idealisation in conveying within a recursive and fragmented narrative the complexity of the era from a historical and cultural point of view.