Unidentified narrative objects: notes for a rhetorical typology

Abstract

This article attempts to circumscribe a field of enquiry around what Wu Ming 1 defined as ‘unidentified narrative objects’. It demonstrates how, within narratives such as Asce di Guerra (2000) [Axes of War] by Wu Ming and Vitaliano Ravagli, Gomorra (2006) [Gomorrah] by Roberto Saviano, Dies irae (2006) [Day of Wrath] by Giuseppe Genna and Sappiano le mie parole di sangue (2007) [My Words be Bloody] by Babsi Jones, a recurrent series of modal figures defines the relationship between literature and the real. Starting from Gomorra, the article attempts to delineate a taxonomy, to make sense of the continuous overlapping and re-bidding between the textual and the extra-textual fields at stake in the novels. The aim is both to clarify how these novels take up a liminal literary position and to deepen our understanding of their own peculiar form of realism. The notion of realism in this context refers less to a stylistic construct according to specific compositional codes than to a ‘textualization of the real’, wherein reality presents itself within the texts through a system of references external to the text itself.