Circle and Arrow: Ambivalent Figures of Desire in Ornela Vorpsi’s Transnational Writing

Abstract

Ornela Vorpsi’s novel Tu Convoiteras is best to be analyzed using methods known from visual studies and intertextuality to fully understand its transnational and transcultural aspects. The basis of my article is the hypothesis to regard the French source text with its emphasis on sexual desire and the Italian version whose title focuses on the mother-child-relationship as two wings of a diptych. The photographic image of an enigmatic mannequin, the so-called Carubina di Mence, shown on the cover of the Italian edition seems to offer the reader guidance. Vorpsi plays with different forms of visuality, colours and geometric figures and I consider two elements as being particularly relevant: the circle with the mother figure in its centre and the arrow, a symbol of desire and time. Various intertexts from Hinduism, from the Old Testament, as well as from the Greek mythology, are freely taken on by the author and melted into her very own personal coordinate system. At a prominent place Vorpsi’s narration interlocks with Ivan Turgenev’s story First Love and Leopold von Sacher-Masoch's Venus in Furs. Tu convoiteras not only provides a contribution to the continuation of an aesthetic of perversion, the Albanian-born author not only observes Western European ethical complacency skeptically, but she also questions her problematic ego, due to the traumatic past. A happy ending is missing, all that remains for Vorpsi and her protagonist is to capture the tragedy of desire and suffering in the medium of the arts.