Facts, Politics, Creativity. Political Commitment in Contemporary Narrations Through Two Case Studies: Presente and Piove all’insù

Abstract

This paper deals with two distinct modalities of contemporary writings used as a means of civil and political engagement: "low-fictionality" and “fully novelistic” narrative forms. After a short theoretical analysis which, starting from Walter Benjamin, assessing the most recent perturbations in the narrative system, the paper looks at the collective diary “Presente” to show the way through which the strict factualness of this narration is increasingly questioned through the book, while a creative twist — i.e. an antirealistic sprouting, which causes the veridictive strategies of the diaristic forms as a means to describe reality to collapse. The second book here analysed is the novel “Piove all’insù”, of which this paper emphasizes the distance from other contemporary “historical” or “meta-historical” narrations, as well as “novels of remembrance” diffused in the last few years. At the same time the paper points out how at the very center of this novel is an utopian drive, strongly anti-factual, as a basis for political action. The conclusions insist on how both these forms, albeit so different from each other, do not consider social or political commitment feasible without using the figural force so typical of fiction.