Italy's first postcolonial novel and the end of (neo)realism

Abstract

ABSTRACTIn this article, I argue that Ennio Flaiano's Tempo di uccidere (A Time to Kill, 1947) is both the first Italian postcolonial novel and a highly complex literary work that should be acknowledged as a major text of twentieth-century literature. I discuss the hermeneutic function of parodic intertextuality in Tempo di uccidere, and its relationship with Dante's Commedia. Tempo di uccidere not only subverts many tenets of neorealism (and may therefore in some respects be compared to Italo Calvino's Il sentiero dei nidi di ragno), but it also exposes the violence inherent in the realist novel as a mode of representation. The article shows how Flaiano highlights hermeneutic issues of misreading, misrepresentation, and the violent erasure of the other, ironically prophesizing its own misreading by critics. Critics and readers have in fact – the article shows – consistently misrepresented, obfuscated, or glossed over the rape and murder of an Ethiopian woman that Flaiano unequivocally places at the centre his text. Tempo di uccidere is a multilevelled, modernist and ultimately postmodernist and allegorical text that – well before Edward Said articulated his own critique – disavows the violence of the realist novel and its complicity with European imperialism.