LA VITA INVOLONTARIA DE BRIANNA CARAFA : POUR UNE RHÉTORIQUE DE LA CRISE
BRIANNA CARAFA'S VITA INVOLONTARIA: FOR A RHETORIC OF THE CRISIS

Summary/Abstract: The unintentional life (La vita involontaria) is the Italian writer Brianna Carafa’s first novel. It was published in 1975 by Einaudi and recently re-released by Cliquot. In our article we will study how the main character’s existential anguish enters the language creating a real rhetoric of the crisis. The author, being psychoanalyst herself, wisely plays with a series of figures of speech in order to reproduce in literature the broken world of the main character Paolo Pintus. Starting from this context, we are going to analyze how the synecdoche of the “red roofs” or the metaphorical language used to describe the character’s hometown, as well as the surroundings and the environment where he finds himself, manage to build a sort of meta text. For the main character’s suffering, worsened by an ataraxia that seems to lead him to ruin, pours through the fictional language. The reader finds himself faced to a double text: Paolo Pintus’ crisis – his intellectual and relational illness – ends up infecting the literary fabric leading to an authentic pathology of the word. The latter, being unable to transpose the truth of a suffering, falls into what’s considered the worst of evils by Carafa: inaction, silence or, to paraphrase the name of Pintus’ hometown (Oblenz), into the oblivion, the lack-of-being, the dissipation.

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