L’impresa della scrittura di Grazia Deledda: dar voce alla pietra

Andrea Cannas

2024-01-01

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Abstract

Reconnecting with a millennial tradition of oral and folk tales, from which the Janas and Giants emerge as archetypal relics, Grazia Deledda’s work founded the literary imaginary of the Sardinian landscape: mountainous, stony and megalithic. The writer from Nuoro successfully exported these images outside the island and handed them down to the writers of the following generations. The landscape in Deledda’s fiction is thus set from the centrality of stone: the wide semantic and symbolic spectrum guarantees the presence of stone a narratological discriminating function in the fabric of the story. Moreover, Deledda’s writing moves in depth: the systematic use of simile, which predisposes continuous metamorphoses from the inorganic to the organic and vice versa, does not correspond to the precepts that distinguish realist fiction, but implies the possibility of accessing, beyond the first level of the real, a world that can no longer be framed within rational coordinates.