Curzio Malaparte's La pelle. Extreme Experience and the Rhetoric of Interruption

Abstract

Abstract This essay proposes a reading of Curzio Malaparte's La pelle (1949) grounded in a comparison with Georges Bataille's conception of a “limit-experience” as a source of literary intensity, the pathetic force able to undo the author's ideological dominance on the work. Taking into consideration the traumatic reality of war and degradation from which the novel originates, my essay examines the contradictions between Malaparte's self-absolutory strategy throughout the book, and the disruptions to the mimetic flow of his prose, where the anxiety generated by the author's personal situation within that historical condition produces what I call a “rhetoric of interruption.” Key to my interpretation of Malaparte's text is the use he makes of the medieval iconography of the Triumph of Death and of the literary topos of the plague, both of which play an important role in the construction of La pelle.