Watery Existence: immaginari dell’acqua tra arte e letteratura nella poetica modernista

Abstract

Water has always been an element of border and threshold, both as a political frontier between nations, and in the symbolic value of transition between life and death, between the real world and beyond, between silence and narration. Modernist poetry is characterized by the presence of this element (Woolf, Eliot) both as a term of reflection on the human existence and as a symbol of human life in its flexibility, inconsistency, strength and dissolution.This article looks at the different implications of visual and literary works that are substantiated in the imagination of the water. Water represents the creative desire of the narration (Virginia Woolf, The Waves) that runs smoothly in the recesses of the human psyche, and contrasts with the aridity of silence that corresponds to a lack of logos. Water represents a desire for origins (To The Lighthouse), but also for maternal death (death by water) and total dissolution.Visual arts mirror this awareness, especially in the extensive series of depictions of the character of Ophelia (Margaret MacDonald, WGSimmonds, Steck). Water is here the dominant pictorial element, symbol of the innate human tendency to cross the boundary between the human and divine.