La “Palermo del fuoco e delle lacrime” nel “racconto” di Vincenzo Consolo

Abstract

‘Unfortunately, this is not fiction, not a novel, but reality, tragic, painful reality,’ commented Vincenzo Consolo in March 1992, in the Corriere della Sera, in response to yet another bloody event, the murder of Salvo Lima, with a troubled tone that revealed the growing centrality of the dilemma between ‘fact and fiction’ in his writing. This tormented expression would soon find its way into Lo spasimo di Palermo, a novel whose inventive plot, woven around the Via D'Amelio massacre, dramatises the pitfalls of “silence”, the repulsion of the “invasion of the report”, and the spectre of the “disappearance of memory”. This presentation will focus on the inexhaustible thematic and formal work through which, particularly in the controversial decade of the 1990s, when mafia massacres were rampant, these tensions were translated into the writer's essays and fiction, which, even in the short form of journalistic prose, questioned contemporary history and the ability of words to interpret civic resistance. It will also reflect on how, particularly since the years in which the exemplary experience of Il sorriso dell'ignoto marinaio (The Smile of the Unknown Sailor) matured in 1976, the need to go beyond referential descriptiveness persists, even in the form of the article, through an exercise of the pen that draws precisely from the multiple pronunciations of fiction, literary and artistic, from the unprecedented representation in the narrative of reality, its peculiar cognitive and ethical vigour.