La presenza della madre morta nell’opera letteraria di Erri De Luca

Abstract

The Presence of the Dead Mother in Erri De Luca’s Literary Work

The present article looks at Erri De Luca’s literary work from the perspective of André Green’s metaphorical concept of the dead mother. According to Green, the dead mother refers to a living mother who is physically present, but seems dead to her child, after having transformed from a loving figure into an emotionally absent, cold, and seemingly inanimate one. First, the article analyses the discrete textual presence of the phantom of the author’s dead sister at childbirth. A superposition of texts from different genres reveals the rivalry between the phantom of the dead sister and the author/his first-person narrators. Second, the article studies the destructive potential of the mother’s voice. Focusing on the tactile sense, it shows how the mother, rather than protecting her child, actually transmits onto him or her, the physical pain suffered by other Neapolitan children at the hands of their violent fathers. Finally, the paper explores the significance of the mother’s real death within the diegesis in terms of a literary murder.