| dc.description.abstract | The character of Lidia crosses the centuries making a journey that is not always so
precise, alternating moments in which she finds herself a character of invention to
others in which she is a referential character: through the Latin, Portuguese and
finally Italian Literature, Lidia reveals aspects sometimes contrasting, sometimes
convergent, which bear, however, all the same name, of which not even a single,
univocal identification recognizable in literature exists, as instead happens for other
characters. So what is its genesis, its "archeology"? In the beginning, Lidia is an
incorporeal presence from the Stoic-Epicurean thought within the Latin Odi of
Horace and the Portuguese Odi of Ricardo Reis, then she becomes a subversive
passionate and enamored maid in the novel by the Portuguese writer Jose Saramago
The year of the death of Ricardo Reis, in which the author is adept at converting the
clichés of classical poetry through remarkable intertextual relationships and through
the literary creation of an unscrupulous Lidia. Thanks to Giosue Carducci in the
nineteenth century and to Giovanna Sicari, Pietro Tripodo and Antonio Tabucchi in
the second half of the twentieth century, Lidia then became a real woman as well as a
literary one, that is, she took life from a series of biographical experiences and / or
reinterpretations of tradition. The paper therefore wishes to highlight how much
continuity and how much discontinuity parallel to the evolution of the character of
Lydia in literature through the centuries: in accordance with the thematic and stylistic
needs of every age and every culture, Lidia has manifested itself without a body and
without a soul and has come to be a representation of a real woman, set in our
contradictory contemporaneity, of which she becomes a symbol, because in the end
nothing is more poetic than the imperfection of reality, and the most arduous
challenge it is translating into literary terms what apparently seems untranslatable in
reality, mysterious in its senselessness and its misery. Even the person would
originally be a character, the essential character (as in the case of the Carolina Piva,
who becomes Lidia while remaining Carolina); a sort of indispensable fiction, which
allows him to represent himself as a corporeal, psychic, linguistic, spiritual unity, in
the fundamental circumstances of his existence: "to exist without existing", Pavel
would say. Character also wants to say double up, then multiply to infinity the power
of this original fiction which consists in appearing on the world scene as an
individual, as a unit. Lidia therefore allows the reader, in every moment of her
representation, to feel in some way more or less illusively portrayed by that character,
independently of any realistic verisimilitude: she is the truth that encompasses every
utopia, is proximity and estrangement from all philosophies, is the failed attempt to
separate towards and life and the proud acceptance of a reunion and a possible
coexistence between ideal and real. Ultimately it is a character who makes a parable
from a primitive non-credibility to a reached credibility; and in this way he comes to
represent in the most convincing way a possible image - among the innumerable ones
- of contemporary man, allowing us to look at a world made up of individuals, stable
things, substantial units, which tries to defend itself from chaos, from pure
multiplicity, from the permeability of everything with everything with the mysterious
and immutable power of literature. [edited by Author] | it_IT |
