Abstract

“Cien anos de participacion:” Magical Realism and Italian History in Antonio Tabucchi’s Piazza d’Italia Monica Hanna CUNY Graduate Center Cosa vuoi che me ne importi dell’Italia, con questo ghi- accio. Ho chiesto ai compagni se a loro gliene importa e tutti la pensano come me. Il capitano mi ha diffidato di sovversione. 1 In Antonio Tabucchi’s 1975 novel Piazza d’Italia. Favola popolare in tre tempi, un epilogo e un’appendice, 2 the main character fights for Italy during World War I. In a letter to his beloved, he describes the harsh physical conditions he suffers in the trenches. “Cosa vuoi che me ne importi dell’Italia, con questo ghiaccio,” he asks, explaining that his fellow sol- diers feel the same way. This questioning of the power of nationalism is typical in the novel. Piazza d’Italia surveys important moments of Italian national history as experienced by a family of rebels who often oppose the forces of the nation in their fictional Tuscan town of Borgo. Tabucchi’s novel begins with an epilogue and travels backward and forward in time in order to relate one hundred years of Italian history, from the Risorgimento through the two world wars to the establishment of the Italian republic, compressed into a narrative of one hundred fifty pages. The family and their friends are skeptical of the representation of national history as one of progress, instead noting the many negative reverberations of that national history in the lives of the protagonists of the novel. The narrative structure of the text mirrors this skepticism, veering away from a traditional representation of historical progress to one of fragmentation, repetition, and shifts in time. Tabucchi employs a variety of methods to re-structure historical representation. One prominent structural method employed by the novel is that of magical realism, which allows for the representation of a cyclical, rather than linear or progressive, history. The text also draws on Carte italiane, Vol. 5 (2009) 199

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