Lettura ‘affettiva’ di un romanzo contemporaneo. Per una proposta di attraversamento testuale

Abstract

Following in Virginia Woolf’s footprints, recognizing the need for a book to «adjust to the body», the article proposes a reading ‘in context’ of a contemporary Italian novel, Riccardo Capoferro's first work, «Oceanides». Based on several critical perspectives which, especially during the twentieth century, have described the reading as a form of active participation (Iser, Jauss, Gadamer etc.), the essay analyzes the structure, the literary echoes, the stylistic and thematic resonances of the novel. The latter are put in dialogue with literary traditions, explicitly or implicitly mentioned in the text, and with the ‘literary heritage’ active in the cultural atmosphere of the present time. This involves the imaginative horizon of writer and reader. The link between text and reader is strengthened by the need to include the physical presence of the bodies and surrounding spaces in the critical act of reading. The novel thus becomes (also) a concrete object and a traveling companion, not only for its ability to create narrative worlds, but also for its being actually ‘with’ the reader. As an appendix to the essay, there are some photographic images that reproduce the book ‘in the context of reading’: a critical and real journey of the reader together with the novel. This concise narration through images, testifies to the sharing of experiences on multiple levels, fictional and existential, mnemonic, and visual, which are at the basis of the critical analysis of Capoferro's novel. Therefore, the elements involved in the interpretative process of the ‘affective’ reading, as proposed here, appear as fundamental moments, equally contiguous and distant, united and separate, in the re-construction of the textual meaning. Furthermore, the coexistence of numerous factors shows the capacity of ‘active’ reading to give shape (also) to extra-textual associative chains that produce bonds (including affective ones) with the text itself.