Scritture separate: autocensura testuale e imposizione visuale del bondage in Dino Buzzati

Abstract

The last period of Dino Buzzati's literary production (1960-1971) offers topics and stylistic forms that significantly diverge from the author's persona as prematurely proposed by criticism. Buzzati's prose here includes erotic and sensuous themes, while the author adds some visual elements that become increasingly pivotal in their experimentalism. This twist on contents and forms reaches is apex in some images of bondage proposed in Buzzati's opere doppie (Coglitore): Le storie dipinte, Poema a fumetti e I miracoli di Val Morel. The drawings in the books are frequently explicit, but bondage is never present in the text, where nothing but distant allusions to it can be found.Moving from Gius Gargiulo's work on the topic, this study interrogates this feature of the works going beyond the level of autocensorship. I will propose to read Buzzati's formal choice through the concepts of aesthetism and suspension that Gilles Deleuze recognizes as peculiar of masochism in his study on Leopold von Sacher-Masoch Masochism: Coldness and Cruelty.Buzzati's works are therefore contextualized in literary and cinematographic Italian production between 1965 and 1975, with reference to Gianni Celati's Il chiodo in testa and Liliana Cavani's Il portiere di notte. I therefore compare the aesthetic function of bondage in Buzzati's paintings to the narrative function of the masochistic scene in Pier Vittorio Tondelli's Camere Separate.