Enigma, straniamento ed equivoco. I primi anni del secondo dopoguerra e la narrazione del nemico fascista.

In this paper I will argue that the Aristotelean trope of enigma best exemplify the narrative function of many Fascist characters in post-World War II Italian literature. The fascists present in novels such as Un eroe del nostro tempo by Vasco Pratolini, Il prete bello by Goffredo Parise, La luna e i falò by Cesare Pavese, all appear to be riddled surfaces which thwart the hero’s search for truth and the author’s ethical mission to provide an objective portrait of the past. Sadism, sexual perversion and ambiguity, physical deformation, form the common traits of identities which seem to escape uncomplicated categorization and definition. Fascist villains are the agents of mystery and of the fantastic within the plot, they often disrupt realism’s ambition towards a truthful account of history, as can be seen in Italo Calvino’s Ultimo viene il corvo. In this sense, their models are the heroes and femme fatale of the gothic novel or the tormented sinners of Dostoevsky’s novels. Rhetorically speaking, the fascist character is like an enigma, the trope that Aristotle in his Poetics and Rhetoric defined as closed or hidden simile that provides insight, pleasure and perspicuity to the reader by giving her/him the stimulation of an unusual combination of words and metaphors. Figures like the female collaborator, often a prostitute, or the sadomasochist fascist official, have an enigmatic moral and political identity that the main hero struggles to frame and decipher. Thus, antifascist authors and heroes share a similar aesthetic and phenomenological problem when called to remember and describe their political enemy. Far from being an embodiment of absolute evil, the fascist character ends up working as a mirror where the good heroes of the Resistance might unexpectedly recognize their own share of sin, thus compromising the finalization of meaning in a coherent, teleological mythical narrative of national foundation and redemption.