Autofictional Strategies in Michele Mari’s Leggenda Privata

Abstract

Leggenda privata (2017) is the latest in a series of autobiographical writings by Michele Mari. The novel is the factual narration of the author's childhood and adolescence, documented by family photos, but is also the narration of a fictional and fantastic situation of writing, where the reader is involved in live recording. In particular, the narrative framework is structured almost like a personal essay that engages dialogically the norms and potentials, opportunities and risks of a theory of autobiography. The purpose of this article is to explore the limits, the difficulties, indeed the impossibility of autobiographical writing in Leggenda Privata, which instead verges towards a complex autofictional strategy. The analysis is focused on the narrative framework and the onomastics, and the consequent theoretical questions that they raise, namely the definition of the literary genre and the identification of the subject. As the search for a proper term to identify this new form of writing confirms that Mari’s novel does not easily fit into the norms of the autobiographical genre, the multitude of names attributed to the protagonist reveal the difficulty of narrating a unitary identity for the subject.