Failure to Mourn: Challenges to the Work of Mourning in Twentieth-Century Italian Literature

Author

Mattia Mossali, The Graduate Center, City University of New YorkFollow

Date of Degree

6-2024

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Ph.D.

Program

Comparative Literature

Advisor

André Aciman

Committee Members

Giancarlo Lombardi

Nancy K. Miller

Subject Categories

Comparative Literature | Italian Literature | Psychological Phenomena and Processes

Keywords

Gina Lagorio, Lalla Romano, Pier Vittorio Tondelli, mourning, illness

Abstract

This project brings together, in a novel combination and through a comparative and transnational perspective, three Italian authors from the Twentieth century who around the same years have produced texts in an effort to verbalize the pain caused by the loss of a loved one: Gina Lagorio (1922-2005), Lalla Romano (1906-2001), and Pier Vittorio Tondelli (1955-1991). Through a variety of literary forms, from fictional self-representations in “autobiographical” novels to the desire for authenticity that characterizes so-called grief memoirs, each of them confronts the challenge of how to write about the deeply painful experience of mourning. After witnessing death, they look back on their lives as if to order them and put them on paper, but in no case, I argue, is the aim to move on and overcome the tremendous pain generated by loss, as a certain psychoanalytical tradition would have it. Deviating from the classical binary distinction between “healthy” finite mourning and “unhealthy” melancholia, as initially described by Freud in his seminal Mourning and Melancholia (1917), what the authors here scrutinized rather do is cling to their pain, as if to maintain a sort of affectionate, yet not pathological, relationship with the deceased. To work through mourning, one needs to find a substitute; this is at least what Freud taught us. But what if the product of this substitute is not so much a palliative as it is an unexpected source of pleasure? That is the pressing question on which this study focuses. The texts on which this project centers are proper act of writing, whose role lies only apparently in the processing of loss, since they eventually result in a non-processing, or better yet, in an alternative form of processing, a sort of voluntary failure that opens up an “intermittent” zone of affection, characterized by an equally intermittent oscillation between pain and pleasure.

Recommended Citation

Mossali, Mattia, "Failure to Mourn: Challenges to the Work of Mourning in Twentieth-Century Italian Literature" (2024). CUNY Academic Works.
https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/5764