The Mythopoietic Function of the Noir: Gianrico Carofiglio Towards a New Mythology of Justice (Critical Essay‪)‬

Eppure e vero che non si prosegue la lotta contro lo stato di cose presente se non si e ispirati da una qualche narrazione. Wu Ming (1) The increasing success enjoyed in Italy by the noir genre--evidenced by a variety of indicators including volume of sales, permanence in the best--(and long--) sellers lists, creation of specialised series and/or publishing houses--has been accompanied over the past decade by a concomitant singular phenomenon: the emergence of a new category of writer that could be named 'the law professional turned noir practitioner'. Senior police officers (Giuttari, Matrone, Di Cara), judges (Cannevale, De Cataldo, Cacopardo, Mannuzzu, Carofiglio, Von Borries) and lawyers (Filasto), whilst fully engaged in the exercise of their principal activities as custodians and upholders of the law, have also become the newest breed of Italian noir authors. Not only are they very productive in terms of output, but are also immensely successful in terms of the response that their novels elicit: they reach high volumes of sales in a market which traditionally registers modest figures; (2) attract an ever-growing body of readership, not through complex marketing operations but almost exclusively through word of mouth; (3) and affect the culture market in its globality, generating interest also in the cinema and television industries. Their novels, often making use of the array of statutory genre conventions that typically include crime(s) and investigation(s), are however different from most, or perceived by readers as such, because of the position of authority from which their discourses are uttered. The "passionate and large public" that, according to Carlo Lucarelli, finds in some writers accurate interpreters of the social dynamics of contemporary Italy, (4) will trust in the knowledge and vision of authors who experience and navigate the dysfunctions of the system in their working life and trust them to shed light on--if not to make sense of--the inconsistencies of Italian society. This essay aims to discover whether the analysis of social conflicts and of the dark side of the human psyche--which is typically the focus of noir fiction--receives a different spin when conducted by a legal mind, and whether the works of these now established writers add a further dimension to the fertile and varied field of the genre in Italy. It also sets out to ascertain whether from the success of these novels one can evince evidence of--or potential for--a transformative action of literature upon the principles or operational patterns of the law. The focus in this essay has been placed on Gianrico Carofiglio--public prosecutor, senator of the Republic, and author--whose novels open up to readers the complex world of the Italian judicial system by centring on representations of the dynamics of criminal trials.