Searching for Self Through Others in Vittorini's Conversazione in Sicilia and Tabucchi's Notturno Indiano (Antonio Tabucchi and Elio Vittorini) (Critical Essay)

Acomparative study of Elio Vittorini's seminal neorealist novel onversazione in Sicilia (1941) and Antonio Tabucchi's postmodern novella Notturno indiano (1989) reveals that, in both works, a protagonist makes a literal journey that becomes a voyage of self-discovery, during which conversations with people he meets along the way become primary and comprise the search for identity. The ostensible superficiality of the works' similarity belies a deeper thematic affinity. Both texts suggest that a true understanding of self comes through the ability to place oneself in a community and in history, and in particular, with the poor and suffering. This theme is conveyed in both works, firstly, through a confusion of categories relating to human identity and through unconventional characterizations that connote universality. Further, both authors create a questionable narrative reality that is dreamlike and that challenges the conventional way that time frames experience. Memory is crucial in this narrative creation in that an individual's history is essential to understanding his role in the culture, anda culture's history to understanding its place in the world and in humanity. The surreal, dream, and memory suggest a convergence of various forms of human experience and conspire to heighten the universality of the narrative voice. Crucially, both texts are deeply entrenched in their authors' worlds--Vittorini's explicitly rooted in Fascist Italy and centered on the narrator's experience of homecoming, Tabucchi's situated in the locale and post-colonial culture of India from the exoticized perspective of an outsider, with implicit thematic parallels to other cases of oppression and social inequity across the world and time. Bookending the second half of twentieth century Italy, Vittorini's and Tabucchi's works speak of their historical, political, and cultural contexts, relating a nation's experience to the world and to the human condition. Elio Vittorini's Conversazione in Sicilia presents a journey of the protagonist who is besieged by a state of amnesia and apathy, or what Campana calls anesthesia. Silvestro is dismayed at the atrocities of the world, but not compelled to do anything about it: "Ero agitato da astratti furori, non nel sangue, ed ero quieto, non avevo voglia di nulla" (6). This state is specifically tied to a lack of memory and to a denial of his childhood and of ties with his family and roots in Sicily, "come se mai avessi avuto un'infanzia in Sicilia trai fichidindia e lo zolfo, nelle montagne" (6). Silvestro impulsively journeys to Sicily, the land of his birth, to re-access his memory and his connection with family members, and thereby find himself. This journey, we are told several times, is a journey in the fourth dimension, offering a conflation of past and present (memory and live experience), which, coupled with confusion regarding characters, renders the effect of timelessness and universality (Usher). This journey in the fourth dimension, an alternate consciousness, allows Silvestro to approach himself and his experiences from the outside--the only path to true self-discovery--in the form of a pilgrimage, "una liturgia della redenzione il/la cui fine e farsi straniero a se stesso" (Schiliro 193). To this end, Silvestro experiences a simultaneous layering of present and memory regained: "Era questo, mia madre; il ricordo di quella che era stata quindici anni prima, venti anni prima ... il ricordo, e l'eta di tutta la lontananza, l'in piu d'ora, insomma due volte reale.... ogni cosa era questo, due volte reale; e forse era per questo che non mi era indifferente sentirmi la, viaggiare, per questo che era due volte vero ... la Sicilia stessa insomma, tutto reale due volte, e in viaggio, quarta dimensione" (61-62). Memory and dream too intertwine for Silvestro, as Concezione recounts her father's role in the St. Joseph's Day procession:" 'Mi sembra di ricordare,' dissi io, e in effetti mi sembrava di averla al