« Strange people, you are! » : le rite de la figliata dans La pelle de Curzio Malaparte
In chapter V of Curzio Malaparte’s La pelle (1949), the autodiegetic narrator recounts attending a figliata, a ritual practised in Campania that consists in a man simulating the act of giving birth to a boy. While Malaparte’s highly dramatised account is often cited in scholarly works on the subject...
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | fra |
| Published: |
École Normale Supérieure de Lyon Editions
2024-12-01
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| Series: | Laboratoire Italien |
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | https://journals.openedition.org/laboratoireitalien/12812 |
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| Summary: | In chapter V of Curzio Malaparte’s La pelle (1949), the autodiegetic narrator recounts attending a figliata, a ritual practised in Campania that consists in a man simulating the act of giving birth to a boy. While Malaparte’s highly dramatised account is often cited in scholarly works on the subject, this article sets out to highlight the way in which the author, far from acting as an ethnologist or anthropologist, inserts this element of folklore into a work that is eminently literary and ideological, where personal experience and fiction are constantly intertwined. In the end, what seems to matter is the spectacular and provocative nature, as well as the symbolic dimension of a practice tinged with paganism, which combines sexuality, death and birth, rather than the rite itself. Malaparte bends the rite to his demands as a writer and polemicist, moving from the ultra-local dimension of the rite to a more broadly European reflection. In this text, the rite is no longer practised by femminielli, “endemic” figures of Naples and its region, but by “inverts” from all over the world: the figliata, while demonstrating the survival in Naples of an archaic and irrational substratum, thus becomes a sounding board for a troubled reflection on the relationship between victors and vanquished in Allied-occupied Italy and, more broadly, on the emergence of a new society after the Second World War. |
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| ISSN: | 1627-9204 2117-4970 |