I «‘Romanzi’ di Montale» nella prosa lirica di Curzio Malaparte

Abstract

The author explores – as it has never been pointed out by the critics – the common ground between Eugenio Montale’s novel-like poetry and the lyrical prose of Curzio Malaparte. Althought seemingly unrelated, this work illustrates to what extent Montale’s poetics underpin Malaparte’s creative expression, to the point that the entire malapartian production turns out precisely to be a both linguistic and metalinguistic developing process starting from Montale’s frame. French contingentism, objective correlative, taking in influences by adhering to them or by opposing them, as well as a collection of recurring metaphors that find their shared space as early as 1925, when editor Piero Gobetti sent to the print both Montale’s Ossi di seppia and Malaparte’s Italia barbara, becoming a guide, a friend and a poetic father for the two authors. Both Montale and Malaparte also wrote for the literary review «Prospettive», founded and directed by Malaparte himself and through which he repeatedly nodded at the objective correlative theory as well as at the idea of going beyond the past literary tradition, foreboding the coming of a novel that could embody the sense of poetry and, thus, looking again at the full potential of an ermetism that – on his judgement – was still unfulfilled by being kept confined to the field of poetry. This has been the jumping-off point for Malaparte’s literary style in his major production.