I mille volti di Lidia: genesi e sviluppo del personaggio

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]