Riesgo Empresarial

In tackling the theme of the exploitation of this defenceless child-animal, Ortese employs two devices in the portrayal of Estrellita as a victim: the use of description in the place of dialogue and the repeated presence of diminutives. Unlike Masino, for victimised characters, Ortese prefers third-person description to dialogue, where dialogue allows for characters to play a more active role. This choice can be seen as yet another way of presenting the passive role of such creatures as Estrellita and other extraordinary children thereby underlining their defencelessness and how much of a victim each is. The Iguana‘s description is entrusted completely to a third-person narrator; her brief direct speech interventions are limited to thanking Daddo, to short utterances in Portuguese such as ‗Nâo para mim… Nâo para mim…‘,118

and to cries of pain and fear. In the first quotation above, for example, Estrellita does not utter a word. While struggling with the bucket, she only sighs. When Daddo does help her with the bucket, she looks at him murmuring and imploring, and when Daddo gives her a hand with a heavy volume, she is mute, communicating by an imploring look in her eye. This is also true for other victimised creatures such as Hieronymus in Il cardillo addolorato as Baldi rightly explains:

Nell‘Iguana e nel Cardillo addolorato (1993) le tribolazioni dei reietti

ripropongono quindi la dialettica di silenzio e voce su un piano

speculativo, cosí da mettere sotto accusa una mancanza e un abuso del

vivere vecchi di secoli; la ―servetta‖ Iguana frequenta con impaccio il dominio della parola (e al termine del romanzo farà scarsi progressi

nell‘apprendere a leggere e a scrivere), mentre il ―servitorello‖ Käppchen ne è addirittura esiliato (fatta salva una finale

questa operazione a Milano, per non rendersi conto che quei rotolini erano, per la disgraziata servetta, denaro, o come tali le erano stati dati ed essa li considerava‘.

46 lamentazione). L‘allusione a sfumature regionali e la mimesi del

registro dialettale introdotte in precedenza nei racconti lasciano qui

luogo, nelle vittime, a una lingua esitante, sincopata ed ellittica,

contaminata da forestierismi (il portoghese nell‘Iguana, il francese e il

tedesco nel Cardillo).119

It is not surprising, then, that the presence of almost-dumb characters, generally a child or child-animal, is a recurrent feature in Ortese‘s works. Besides Estrellita and Hieronymus, other mute characters are Sasà in Il cardillo addolorato and Mohammed in Alonso e i visionari. Silence, with the inability to voice suffering, Baldi points out, denounces the subjugation and violence to which weaker beings are gratuitously subjected by mankind. I would also add that the lack of recourse to speech for these Ortesian characters, on a more general level, is perfectly in line with the choice of distinguishing a domineering mankind, empowered by speech, from the innocent popoli muti, to whom speech is denied. In this regard, George Steiner,120 looking back at classical mythology, describes speech as the human prerogative which functions as a parting line between mankind and other living beings and determines the superiority of man.121 However, resorting to ancient Greek heritage, Steiner adds that speech is for humans at the same time a privilege and a damnation as it gives them a dangerous weapon to compete with the Gods.122 Going back to the use of the rhetoric of silence as a way for the author to denounce abuse, Sarah

119 _{Baldi, ‗―Un segreto lamento di perduti‖‘, p. 61.}

120

George Steiner, Language and Silence: Essays 1958-1966 (London: Faber and Faber, 1967).

121 _{Steiner, Language and Silence.}

122 _{See Steiner, pp. 55-56: ‗That articulate speech should be the line dividing man from the myriad}

forms of animate being, that speech should define man‘s singular eminence above the silence of the plant and the grunt of the beast – stronger, more cunning, longer of life than he – is classic doctrine well before Aristotle. [...] Possessed of speech, possessed by it, the word having chosen the grossness and infirmity of man‘s condition for its own compelling life, the human person has broken free from the great silence of matter. Or to use Ibsen‘s image, struck with the hammer, the insensate ore has begun to sing. But this breaking free, the human voice harvesting echo where there was silence before, is both miracle and outrage, sacrament and blasphemy. It is a sharp severance from the world of the animal. [...] More than fire, whose power to illumine or to consume, to spread and to draw inward, it so strangely resembles, speech is the core of man‘s mutinous relations to the gods‘.

47 Dauncey123 provides an interesting perspective on the use of silence in literature. According to Dauncey:

Silence may be widely deployed within discourses signalling the

existence of racially and culturally subjugated and muted groups but

each instantiation of the motif is discrete. It does, however, work to

link discourses that share in the ambition of revealing oppressive

hegemonic practices.124

This is the use Ortese makes of the rhetoric of silence: a warning and denunciation of the subjugation and abuse to which weaker beings are victims. Ortese‘s preoccupation, however, goes beyond the categories of race and culturally discriminated groups and concerns all the popoli muti, altri popoli.Furthermore,it is interesting to note that silence is not used by Ortese to subvert communication as a form of destructive protest, but rather as an alarm bell for the reader. On this point, I believe it is important to bear in mind Steiner‘s view of silence as another, yet no less important, form of communication similar to speech or the musical note.125 Not only does Steiner see silence as a form of communication, but he also considers it as a viable alternative for poets and writers working under a totalitarian regime:

If totalitarian rule is so effective as to break all chances of

denunciation, of satire, then let the poet cease (and let the scholar

cease from editing the classics a few miles down the road from the

death camp). Precisely because it is the signature of his humanity,

because it is that which makes of man a being of striving unrest, the

123

Sarah Dauncey, ‗The Uses of Silence: a Twentieth-Century Preoccupation in the Light of Fictional Examples, 1900-1950‘ (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Warwick, 2003).

124 _{Dauncey, p. 5.}

125 _{See Steiner, p. 30: ‗We live inside the act of discourse. But we should not assume that a verbal}

matrix is the only one in which the articulations and conduct of the mind are conceivable. There are modes of intellectual and sensuous reality founded not on language, but on other communicative energies such as the icon or the musical note. And there are actions of the spirit rooted in silence. It is

48 word should have no natural life, no neutral sanctuary, in the places

and season of bestiality. Silence is an alternative.126

Chilean, magic realist writer Isabel Allende is another woman writer who, in order to cast light upon the condition of the weakest components of society, resorts to silence as a form of communication. In the House of the Spirits127 one of the main characters, clairvoyant Clara, takes refuge in mutism as a protest against her domineering, violent husband. Silence draws its strength precisely in its apparent hindrance to communication.128

The longest dialogue between the Iguana and Count Daddo starts off in the form of a script, with stage names and cues (‗IG‘ stands for Iguana and ‗CONTE‘ for Daddo) and carries on with the pace and flavour of a dialogue acted out on stage. It is interesting to observe that for the dialogue in which the Iguana is engaged, the author has chosen to let her speak through stage cues rather than spontaneously. Once again, Ortese has chosen to avoid Estrellita‘s natural interaction with Daddo to further emphasise the subjugated condition of a creature who, having been forbidden self- expression, is unable to speak her mind and to discuss her feelings freely. La Penna also points out: ‗Significantly, in two dialogues in which Estrellita is involved, Ortese decides to use the typographical layout of a play script, in order to emphasize the authorial (and the patriarchal and imperialist?) control over the character‘s limited self-expression‘.129 The effect on the readers is to distance them from Daddo‘s perspectives and points of view; the author seems to remind her audience

126 _{Steiner, pp. 73-74.}

127

Isabel Allende, La casa de los espíritus (Barcelona: Plaza & Janés Editores, 2001).

128

The first period of Clara‘s taking refuge in silence occurs after the death of her sister Rosa, when having been traumatised, she decides to stop speaking and this continues for years. The second long period of silence occurs during her second pregnancy and again during her third when her husband punches her breaking some of her teeth. After this episode, she will never speak to her husband Esteban again. It is interesting to note that Clara‘s silence is also parallelled by another form of communication which is not accessible to Ortese‘s dumb characters: writing. She, in fact, keeps a diary where she takes notes about her life, from major events down to the most trivial facts.

49 that the reality presented in the novel is not singular or absolute but rather a series of perspectives put together by an omniscient narrator.

The other linguistic device employed by Ortese to portray the figure of the exploited servant is the widespread use of diminutives, which aims to simply emphasise the smallness of the creatures and to make them appear defenceless and vulnerable. As I will show further on in this chapter, Ortese also makes use of this device for other extraordinary, victimised children. From the passages above taken from L‟Iguana, we can see that Estrellita‘s physical exertion is made even more painful by the recurrent use of diminutives: ‗una delle sue verdi zampette era fasciata‘,130

‗due occhietti supplichevoli‘,131 ‗Togliendole dalle braccine quel peso‘,132

‗sulla testina paurosa‘,133 ‗i suoi occhietti dolci e appassionati‘.134