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Maria Truglio. Beyond the Family Romance: The Legend of Pascoli.

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Maria Truglio. Beyond the Family Romance: The Legend of Pascoli. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007.

Andrea Battistini, Gianfranco Miro Gori, Clemente Mazzotta, eds. Pascoli e la cultura del Novecento. Venice: Marsilio, 2007.

In her fascinating exploration of Giovanni Pascoli's poetry, Maria Truglio develops an original and convincing argument in which theory and textual analysis work in symbiosis to reveal the complexity behind texts that were long subjected to a univocal interpretation. Leaving behind the traditional and somewhat narrow perspective framed by Pascoli's personal vicissitudes (namely the assassination of his father and many other losses that befell the poet and his family), Truglio examines Pascoli's poetry in psychoanalytical terms, concentrating specifically on the notion of the "uncanny." While psychoanalytical readings of Pascoli are not a novelty (Truglio gives due credit to the valuable contributions of Giorgio Barberi Squarotti, Patrizio Rossi, Stefano Agosti, Fausto Curi, and Elio Gioanola), Truglio's approach distinguishes itself for a use of psychoanalysis not as a mere instrument, but as an accompaniment, a discourse that can illuminate Pascoli's texts and be in turn illuminated by them.

Truglio starts out by placing Freud's essay on the "uncanny" and Pascoli's Poemi conviviali side by side and offering a close reading of each, one that opens up a dialogue between theory and literature, breaking down the barrier between the two fields and revealing echoes and similarities. The choice to focus on the "uncanny" is quite felicitous, since the very ambiguity inherent in it serves to highlight a hitherto underplayed ambiguity in Pascoli's production. Thus, a seemingly unambiguous motif such as that of the "nest" turns out to be multilayered and problematic, characterized, much like the "uncanny" itself, by the coexistence of positive and negative elements.

First published in 1919, Freud's "The Uncanny" investigates the sudden experience of the unfamiliar within that which had until that point been considered familiar and safe. The essay begins with the etymological definition of heimlich (familiar) which, as Freud points out, surprisingly contains a shade of its opposite, unheimlich. Freud uses this initial ambivalence as the starting point for his argument on the dual nature of the "uncanny." Concealed within a deceivingly familiar image, the "uncanny" signals the reemergence of repressed fears, in particular "infantile complexes." Freud provides plenty of examples of such occurrences, drawing from both literature (Hoffmann's tale, "The Sandman") and personal experience (his own "accidental" wandering through the red-light district). As Truglio observes, however, Freud's essay itself is not free of ambiguity: on the contrary it meanders just like the author does in the above-mentioned anecdote, constantly brushing against the core but...

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