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Travelling Through the I: Anna Maria Ortese's Melancholic Cities

Abstract Melancholy seems to be the leitmotif around which the entire Ortesian narrative and her personal life are centred, the figure of a black sun becoming, as in Kristeva's Soleil noir a sort of governing trope. In her dualistic tension between creative explosions and introvert implosion (seclusive refusal of the world), Ortese is a melancholic subject at work. The texts I refer to in my discussion (Il mare non bagna Napoli, Silenzio a Milano, La lente scura and Corpo celeste) all share a melancholic mood and illustrate how Ortese's physical and/or metaphorical journeys are filtered and problematized through the dark lens of the writer's melancholic subjectivity and saturnine Weltanschauung, alternately focusing on the microcosms of the 'infinitamente piccolo' and the macrocosm of the galaxies. For Ortese, 'scrivere è tornare a casa', a long desired return to the M/other/land. But it is only a temporary one. Both Ortese the writer/journalist and Ortese the traveller are bound to set off again for another melancholic Odyssey without Ithaca, in a permanent exile.