25 décembre 2022
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Claudio Milanesi, « : Reinventing History with Stories », HAL SHS (Sciences de l’Homme et de la Société), ID : 10670/1.89a240...
Novels of invention and non-fiction unexpectedly go in the same direction, making the narrative evolve in the exact opposite direction to those extreme positions that claim that history and novel are nothing more than two interchangeable types of narratives. In every novel, the dividing line between the true and the invented is variable and jagged. The studies collected here on the novels of Valerio Evangelisti, Antonio Moresco, Antonio Scurati and Umberto Eco are examples of how writers know how to question our relationship with the past and with truth. The mixture of genres - narrative, enquiry, political essay, attempt at historical reconstruction - that has given shape to non-fiction and the literature of memory is also based on a narrative of the past imbued with the voice of the subject. And it enters into an unwritten pact with its reader, who stipulates that the tale narrates events that have taken place. The works of Corrado Stajano and the special issues of the Diario della Settimana Memoria bear witness to this.However, neither novels nor non-fiction rewrite history: they interrogate it, they tell stories from transversal and unprecedented points of view. And in the most experimental cases, such as Il cimitero di Praga, the fake that is concentrated in the novel paradoxically serves the understanding of the true of the dynamics of History. In both cases, our ability to know what happened, and to establish the existence of a clear-cut distinction between truth and falsehood, is then not weakened, but strengthened.