Il linguaggio violento del potere ne La presa di Macallè

Abstract

In the novel La presa di Macallè (2003), Camilleri proposes a parody of Fascist imperialist rhetoric. In the work, the violence of the totalitarian regime, destined to invade every recess of the human psyche and subverting innocence, passes through a language that inserts into the hybrid idiom invented by Camilleri a dense network of dysphemisms that push the representation to the extreme of the obscene, in line with Pasolini’s experiments. The novel recounts Michelino’s triple initiation into sex, violence and anticommunism. The perverse language of power insinuates itself into the personality of the child, who learns to reason with the same tool that decreed the loss of his innocence, to the point of justifying even murder on the basis of logic. This paper proposes an analytical reading of Camilleri’s language, aimed at identifying in La presa di Macallè a turning point in his oeuvre: the construction of a hybrid language, interwoven with dialect features, but at the same time autonomous in its configuration, in this novel becomes the standard on the basis of which Camilleri manages to forge a further and specific style, endowing it with the symbolic force of an instrument of power.