culture
twelve o’clock, September 8, 2021 – 2:44 pm
Collected journalistic texts and reports
from Angelo Petrella
Instinctual but highly cultured writer, disordered yet meticulous to the point of stubbornness, Domenico Rea was one of the greatest Italian storytellers of the late twentieth century.
Compared to other southern intellectuals, he was able to participate in human suffering in a pre-ideological, immediate and emotional way. Less inclined to plunge into the battle between poetics and stylistic elements, Rea becomes a cantor of the plebs, looking more at the great models of the seventeenth-century fairy tale and fourteenth-century short stories, than at the new realistic and late-modernist forms. Yet, precisely for this reason, his short stories and novels know how to look at the present with less pretense and with a renewed polemical charge, common only to the greatest examples of his generation.
In the hypothetical southern line that starts from Francesco Jovine and Carlo Levi, passing through Ignazio Silone and reaching friends – and associates, and rivals – Luigi Compagnone and Annamaria Ortese, the writer from Nocera occupies a very special place. In the lost universe of Nofi, the mythical land of childhood and at the same time a symbol of an almost universal, inexhaustible, irredeemable provincialism, Rea inserts his examination of the human condition, starting from the misery of the urban and peasant underclass, without neglecting the sad rituals of southern bourgeoisie, wacky and grabbing, perennially greedy for the only useful resource to place itself above the law: money. (…) Rea gradually and perhaps unconsciously sets himself the goal of overcoming the pessimism of reality in order to guarantee that reality a higher meaning, a redemption, a palingenesis that is always secular and never satisfied. But, instead of projecting it into the future, in some form of messianic expectation, the native writer of Nocera thinks of embedding it in tradition, relying on ancient yet never overcome forms of satire, tragedy, invective, abhorring folklore and yet plunging the roots of his imaginary up to the oral narration.
Kaleidoscopic not only the vision and the stylistic code of Domenica Rea: kaleidoscopic life, we could say, paraphrasing another great of the twentieth century, Carlo Emilio Gadda. And yet, if the latter insisted on the deformation and the irrepressible linguistic explosion – the only way to access the irreducibility of life – Rea always remained faithful to an ideal, so to speak, Enlightenment, rational, even if never tamed. (…) Even in non-fiction and journalistic prose the author tried to probe the folds of reality, both phantasmic and concrete at the same time, without applying pre-established schemes that were not guided by perception, investigation and history. In the many portraits of Naples – the city of departure and arrival, the true protagonist of his stories – in the faces of the characters he met, in the unexplored places, in the glimpses returned beyond every stereotype, Rea was able to transform the reportage into real genealogy, offering interpretative keys that are still useful today to try to decipher that permanent enigma that the Neapolitan city. A large part of his immense production escaped publication in volume and remained scattered among magazines and periodicals. The collection published by the San Gennaro editions, My Naples, offers a dizzying immersion in a hypothetical walk of the singer of Nofi, which starting from the volcanic epicenter of the Rione Sanit extends to touch its boundaries, always uncertain and never comfortably defined. He does it in the manner of Rea, of course: letting himself be guided by suggestions, by the incumbency of reality, by the arrogance of History. And making the reader feel the hidden meaning of a modernity that is such only because it is reflected in tradition. A modernity, therefore, very ancient.
8 September 2021 | 14:44
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