Logos e Verbo: immagini del male nella narrativa di Nelida Milani

Abstract

This essay aims to highlight the centrality of the themes of guilt and expiation in the writing of Nelida Milani, starting from the recognition of the founding and generating role of writing that is covered by the theme of the word. Logos, understood as the word of man, is at the same time the beginning and the end, the point of departure and landing, a declaration of belonging and identity, an act of faith and a reaction to the continually risk of aphasia and silence. If the word creates bonds and builds personal and collective identity, in Milani’s narrative it is from the betrayal of it, from the breaking of the relationship between signifier and meaning that the Evil is generated and also, at the moment when this break invests the Scriptures, that the meeting point between the word of man and the Word as the word of God is realised. It is therefore in this point of intersection that the reflection on the theme of Evil is central to the writing of Milani, and consequently on those of guilt and expiation, evident above all (but not only) in its most recent narrative. And it is in it, moreover, that the register spends from the ‘comic’ to the ‘tragic’, to identify the role of the writer in the category of ‘responsibility’, in inseparable unity with that of the ‘person’.