Strumenti critici | 2025 | N. 169

The article proposes an interpretation of “Memoriale” focusing on two aspects: the question of literary genre (novel or memorial) and the recurring presence of biblical imagery. From this perspective, the convergence between the lexical choices and the meaning of the title (“memoriale” as ‘anamnesis’ in Catholic liturgy) may be traced back to a conception of industry characterized, as Volponi reveals to Ferdinando Camon in “Il mestiere di scrittore”, by an «ethnocentric ‘Catholicity’ (a disease of all organisms that perceive themselves as superior), which seeks to draw all other cultures into its orbit and subsequently colonize them».

The critical dimension of literary works inspired by factory labour is indisputable. Confronted with industrial modernity, two possible responses emerge: either to reject it outright or to redeem it from its imperfections. As Volponi noted in reply to Ferdinando Camon, «Industry must be corrected, it must be guided through a certain kind of political planning». The challenge is to renegotiate the pact with modernity or to envision counter-modern paradigms that may shape future narrative directions.

The essay offers a reinterpretation of “Corporale” by Paolo Volponi, focusing on the elements within the text that highlight the author’s reflection on the forms of the novel. In this direction, the analysis centers on the strongly allegorical image of a tree felled by the protagonist, Gerolamo Aspri, as a symbol of an indulgent literature that, for Volponi, represents an explicit target – as explained in the lecture “The Difficulties of the Novel”, delivered during the early stages of the novel’s conception. In contrast, the opposing and mirrored image of an abandoned, chaotic, and lush orchard is here taken as an emblem of a literature that deliberately positions itself outside and against conventional frameworks, a stance that “Corporale” itself embodies through its textual structure. In this sense, the meta-literary element is identified through the analysis of the blending of narrative genres – including crime fiction, the diary, and the epistolary novel – present in the text, which in itself reflects the author’s intention to question the forms of the contemporary novel in order to revive and reinforce the literature’s potential to challenge the status quo.

The essay focuses on the second part of “Corporale”, Volponi’s third novel released in 1974, with particular emphasis on the figure of Joaquin Murieta, the alternative personality of the protagonist Gerolamo Aspri. Through a comparative analysis of genetic materials and key historical studies of the 1960s and 1970s (such as those by Molfese and Hobsbawm), the essay suggests that Volponi’s portrayal Murieta draws strong analogies with a cultural discourse of that time, which explores connections between 19th-century social banditry and the protest movements of the European and American New Lefts, which were born and had developed outside the legitimizing framework of communist parties. The essay also identifies a source used by Volponi, a political theory essay by Francesco Leonetti that came out in the radical review «Che fare» in 1971.

In the first part of the article, dedicated to Paolo Volponi’s novel “Il pianeta irritabile” (1978), Federico Milone provides a description of the archival materials preserved in Urbino and Pavia and, based on the variants found in these materials, offers an interpretation of the episode of the city beneath the ice. In the second part, Giacomo Micheletti reconstructs the development of the long sequence of the Imitator of the Song of All Birds and, in conclusion, puts forward a political interpretation of the character’s role within the allegorical system of the novel.

This essay aims to offer a first critical reflection on the importance of exploring the vast documentary material related to Paolo Volponi’s work, and in particular to “Le mosche del capitale”. It can be said that a new vision of the author’s work is emerging, one that consists not only of the works that were published or destined for editorial circuits, but also of those that today, catalogued in folders and files, provide us with important pieces of the writer’s laborious creative process.

The essay investigates the complex and multi-layered phenomenological texture of Paolo Volponi’s first (as for its genesis) and last (as for its publication) novel, “La strada per Roma”. After an essential review of the cultural and philosophical environment in which Volponi started writing the novel, the essay tries to analyze and explain the main character’s “Bildung” in light of Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of perception.

After starting as a poet, Paolo Volponi turns to the novel, but he maintains a poetic dimension even in his narrative style. In his major narrative works, however, there is a polemic against poetry as «indulgence» that corresponds to the obsessive expressionism of his mature poems.