La luce e il fuoco nella narrativa di Francesco Pona: un approccio stilistico-narratologico e culturale dei loro connotati simbolici e metaforici
Light and fire in Francesco Pona's fiction: a stylistic-narratological and cultural approach to their symbolic and metaphorical connotations

Summary/Abstract: Around the oil lamp of the homonymous work written by Francesco Pona (1627) there lingers a whole aura of symbolic-metaphorical meanings, which also spread to other writings either belonging to the same author or available in the contemporary paratext of the work under exam. The specific polyphony of many Baroque narratives is replaced here with a unity both in style and content, made possible by the single narrative voice, precisely the oil lamp, which strategically makes use of rhetorical-imaginative elements that are congenial to it. The propensity for images in which light and fire are dominant is intertwined with a hyperbolic, inflamed, dynamic style, full of pathos which corresponds to the burning passions that torment the protagonists. The chiaroscuro universe, characterized by transience, continuous change and uncertainty, favors the staging of voluptuousness and extreme violence. It is a universe in which knowledge of reality falters like the lights that are present in it: traps, deceptions, misunderstandings, misrepresentations, agnitions, twists and turns are represented with great literary virtuosity. If, on the one hand, in the individual stories, the oil lamp becomes a symbol of the limitations of human knowledge due to the fact that it highlights only a part of reality, on the other hand, in the work as a whole, it rises to a true gnoseological metaphor: the protagonist-narrator ignites in the conscience of the interlocutor a new cognitive light that bears the imprint of a redemptive philosophy, in a heterodox sense of the word.

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