ORIANA FALLACI’S (AUTO)BIOGRAPHICAL SUBVERSION IN "A MAN" ("UN UOMO")

Text as a Verbal Projection of the Self

Abstract

Oriana Fallaci’s refusal of all forms of Oedipal totalitarianism and hegemony, as well as moving away from the already established genre conventions, results in atypical genre entities bearing a pronounced psychological stamp of the author (Porzio). These formally undefined texts follow the program of the so-called non-Oedipal aesthetics (Irigaray), within which predictability and completeness, integrity and totality, order and system give up their places to spontaneity and fragmentariness, variability, and heterogeneousness, overlapping and interweaving. Aricò emphasizes how in Fallaci’s case this resulted in a formal creative mess, an almost complete fusion of reality and fiction, a blurred transition from the written to the spoken word, an overlapping of extradiegetic and intradiegetic levels, i.e., in the constitution of a firm semantic and syntactic connection between the author and the narrator (167).This incongruous and asymmetrical textual structure is a result of the complete absence of the universal, omniscient, and superior author’s self existing outside the textual borders. Fallaci’s linguistic creativity opposes the phallic hierarchic system, which includes an already constructed author’s identity. Inclined towards poststructuralist methodology, which sees the author and the narrator as results of rhetorical strategies, i.e. sees the text as a superior and privileged term (Cavarero), as well as rejecting the conventional methodological approach (Aricò 171-173), pronouncing but at the same time overhearing the text (Derrida, The Ear of the Other, 113), the author turns the subject into an object, the text into a “verbal projection of her own self” (Aricò 587). Fallaci’s subversion of the author and the narrator turns the textual into vocal (Spinazzola), biography into autobiography (Rosa 77-80), reality into fiction (Aricò 167). In line with French poststructuralism, Fallaci gives up the affirmation of the authorial subject as an omniscient extradiegetic identity, distanced from his/her own text. In her opinion the authorial subject is a rhetorical construct, constituted by interpretative procedures, moments in which the subject of the text and the subject of reading exchange their places (172). Giving up an already constructed authorial personality reveals the process of writing as a process of reconstruction of one’s own being (Gusdorf 10). Through writing, and injecting of pieces and fragments of linguistic reality, a (re)construction of the authorial subject is enabled, as well as his/her positioning related to the reality that he/she describes (Cavarero; Battersby). In Cavarero’s opinion such discursive methods reflect the influence of the female and the feminine and will result in a never-ending process of linguistic semiosis (100-101). Fallaci’s texts, charged with a strong vocal imprinting become, in this way, a mirror space in which the author’s self, by a mise an abîme effect, reflects and multiplies, a space of performative linguistic strategies (Finci 119).