Staged Narratives, Narrative Stages: The Entanglement of Theatre and Narrative in Italian Literature

Once upon a time there was the storyteller – the aedo, the bard, the cantastorie. He – or she – was a performer and a magician, an author, an actor, a shaman, repeating the stories over and over again, amending pitch, register, gesture, and content to suit the audience and the circumstances in which the tales were told. Fictional stories mingled and merged with factual accounts, and the aim of the game was to keep listeners on their toes, arouse all sorts of emotions in them as long as one important target was met: keep them interested, enthused, glued to the one-man show that was consumed in front of them. This narrating mode was so engrained in popular consumption that when the time came for these stories to be transcribed, when remediation from oral to written narrative occurred – a lengthy process that lasted from the mid-fourteenth to the early seventeenth centuries – authors felt the need to preserve within the silent body of the written text the vibrant communication of the storyteller’s voice.

A number of devices and techniques were deployed for this purpose; in Italian literature, first and foremost the cornice or frame story in its multiple shapes and forms, from Boccaccio to Basile. Here the storytellers became intradiegetic narrators, preserving an embodied (albeit printed) memory of that speech-act which had originally been performed in front of a live audience. Epistolary framing devices were also used, in Bandello’s novellas for instance, which helped further the integration of the epic storyteller whose voice became more and more embedded in the written prose. The process described so far has been the object of in-depth study in Italy and abroad (Alfano, Ó Cuilleanáin, Richardson, to name but a few) and has prompted a number of research questions which I have engaged with over the past few years. 

These questions revolve around the fruitful interaction (and borders) between page and stage, theatre and narrative, performance and prose: what happened to the storyteller’s voice, to his – or her – lively act delivered in a composite blend of vernaculars and standard language, in a playful mixture of low and high registers which combined adventurous or tragic stories and humorous anecdotes?

True: modern theatre kept hold of these storytellers and their ritual space of communication; classic drama from the Renaissance to the end of the nineteenth century was a tight microcosm embodying the ‘always present, interpersonal, event’ (Szondi). So these storytellers kept on living their lives on stage in a more or less structured dimension ruled by an ever-growing number of constraints, including the tyranny of the page, the written cage of a theatrical script.

In the meantime, on the silent stage of narrative prose, despite the gradual disappearance of the storyteller’s character – the intradiegetic narrator of frame stories and individual novellas embodied in a fictional character or preserved in the epistolary dialogue – his/her voice, performance, gesture, penchant for mixing several styles, genres and registers, continued to live in the heteroglossia (Bakhtin) and hybridization of a narrative discourse which in the Italian context struggled to find its novelistic form.

Dominated by that archetype of ‘Bakhtinian dialogism’ that was Dante’s Commedia – with its bold contamination of multiple vernaculars, technical languages, Latinisms, neologisms, Gallicisms, as well as several registers and styles – the tradition of literary realism kept rehearsing its theatrical voice through the pages of our modern Italian novel from Manzoni to Pasolini and beyond. It is not just the case of a realistic narrative prose deviating from the reassuring virtuosity and tidiness of the monolingual Italian standard (Contini) to incorporate the sound and chaos of surrounding reality through a more or less expressionistic prose: think of the Italian Scapigliati, Dossi, Manzoni himself, Gadda, Pasolini. It is also a matter of importing theatrical devices and rhetorical tools such as the choir of the Greek tragedy (in Consolo for instance) or the Verfremdungseffekt of Brecht’s epic theatre (in Vittorini, Calvino and many others) to awaken and enliven the otherwise ‘flat’ register of the nineteenth-century historical novel and ‘verista’ novel. In fact, one way to reconsider the peculiarity of the Italian narrative tradition within the Western canon is to re-evaluate the crucial role that the entanglement of theatre and narrative played in its irregular development.

A recent study of several authors who experimented with the different but interconnected media of drama and narrative prose is the volume  Staged Narrative / Narrative Stages: Essays on Italian Prose Narrative and Theatre, edited by Enrica Maria Ferrara and Cormac Ó Cuilleanáin (Florence: Franco Cesati, 2017).