Sanguineti’s ‘Il Giuoco dell’Oca’: The Novel as an Ecfrastic Board

Edoardo Sanguineti’s second novel Il Giuoco dell’Oca was written between 1963 – the year of the publication of Capriccio italiano – and 1967, and it was conceived as the ideal second step (“stazione”) of a trilogy, concluded only in 2002 with the drafting of L’orologio astronomico.

This book is mostly constructed as a collage of visual referents (from Hieronymus Bosch to Superman). In fact, each of the 111 narrative chapters is designed as a square in a game of “Snakes and Ladders” (“Il gioco dell’oca” in Italian). Yet, instead of the conventional illustrations, the reader finds a series of pictures derived from artworks or products of consumer society.

My research, which employs the methods of visual philology, has allowed me to identify numerous sources. [Three examples of these – works by Mimmo Rotella and Robert Rauschenberg, as well as a vintage toy, “Voiced Boppertop” produced in 1960s – are described in «Antinomie»].

Sanguineti’s omnivorous interests are reflected in his writing practice and in his diverse visual repertoire: for example, in the ecfrastic board some Pop Art artists – like Robert Rauschenberg, Richard Hamilton and Mimmo Rotella – are placed next to anonymous engravings, period photographs (from Marilyn Monroe to Beatles fans), and advertising images.

Ékphrasis is the only macrotextual criterion for considering the book as a romance and not a collection of short stories: the presence of a narrator who describes in detail everything he sees – whether it is mass-cult or mid-cult. Every painting or art object is described in its entirety (colours, materials, forms, etc.), making the narrative structure similar to the Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas. The writer moves through the different chapters like a museum guide who presents and explains the paintings of an imaginary gallery. Moreover, the visual descriptions, in certain cases, overlap with the storyteller’s dreams, in a mixture of realism and oneirism.

A book-palimpsest like this is a significant example of the ideology of the “interdisciplinary intellectual”, which the writers of Gruppo 63 employed to identify themselves from 1960s to 1970s. If the classical ékphrasis often occupied the narrative space of digressions – detached and separated from the central plot –, in contemporary writing one witnesses a continuous evolution and extension of this category. In the case of Il Giuoco dell’Oca, ékphrasis becomes the engine itself of the romance.

Tracing visual sources requires philological inquiry as well as (and above all) a rediscovery of a context characterised by multimedia interactions, which involved poets, musicians, actors, directors, and painters. The literary scholars who work on Sanguineti’s book thus have the duty and opportunity to read these texts against their historical background and original cultural milieu. Philology, combined with sociology, provides an opportunity to shed some light on a literature too often considered as abstruse nonsense.

I believe that, behind its apparent hermeneutic darkness, experimental writing often hides specific references – through the ancient technique of ékphrasis.

Therefore, Il Giuoco dell’Oca represents a kind of modern hypertext, in which intertextual or intermedial quotes replace the interactive links. It is impossible (and over-ambitious) today to know how to move in the «iconosphere» of 1960s – with its myths, images and imaginaries. The task of future scholarly inquiry will be to help the common reader to understand texts written in a particular historical moment (the embryonic consumer society), to stimulate a response from the reader and to be provocative.

In conclusion, speaking about images and ékphrasis will become one of the most useful way to speak about the text – and to allow the text to speak. Unlike novels like Capriccio Italiano or the contemporary poetic production, Il Giuoco dell’Oca seems to be arranged like a real Gallery of images (similar to Giambattista Marino’s one). Besides the intertextuality found in many chapters, most sections are made of precise and detailed descriptions of paintings, movies, advertisements, and even of a toy. So much that, in my opinion, one day it will be possible to reconstruct the entire representational (figurative?) board and play the ‘game of images’ Sanguineti designed in his book.

*** For a more detailed analysis, see Chiara Portesine, «Una specie di Biennale allargata». Il giuoco dell’ecfrasi nel secondo romanzo di Edoardo Sanguineti, Fabrizio Serra, Pisa-Roma, 2021″ (available here).

A detail from Gianfranco Baruchello, Il Giuoco dell’Oca, collage, 82,5 x 63 cm, 1967; © Fondazione Baruchello