Dino Buzzati's Journalism: Reporting from the Borderline

Abstract

This article takes the case of the Italian author Dino Buzzati who, parallel to his literary oeuvre best known for its fantastic qualities, spent forty years from 1928 to 1972 as a journalist and columnist for Corriere della sera, practising every conceivable sub-genre of journalism and becoming a sort of 'directeur occulte' of the paper. Focusing on Cronache terrestri, the selection of Buzzati's articles published posthumously, my analysis explores the borderline between literature and journalism in Buzzati's work for Corriere, singling out for particular attention the intersection between specific journalistic techniques (in particular his 'leads' and his titles) and his recourse to the 'fantastic' in the treatment of topical themes and contemporary events (including war reportage). Buzzati's 'borderline', I argue, can be posited as an 'in between-area' between literature and journalism, reality and fantasy, where the signature of Buzzati, as correspondent for an authoritative Italian daily, validates the existence of (apparently) 'impossible' worlds, and where his accumulation of reportorial details and enumerations create fictions of (hyper) reality and the conditions necessary to the 'hesitation' that Todorov ascribes to the fantastic mode.