The Word Made Animal Flesh

Abstract

Few twentieth-century bodies of work feature animal creatures as consistently and as extensively as that of Tommaso Landolfi. From the early stories of Dialogue of the Greater Systems (Dialogo dei massimi sistemi, 1937) to collections such as The Geckos (Le labrene, 1974), animals appear in Landolfi’s fiction as a destabilizing presence: they signal a chance for change, as with the weregoat of The Moon Stone (La pietra lunare, 1939), or mark points of crisis, like the mysterious porrovio in Cancerqueen (Cancroregina, 1950). These narratives display a constant, albeit nonlinear, movement toward the other-than-human that invests not only man but also objects and eventually language itself. These metamorphoses are not Ovidian in nature; they are neither mythic nor anthropocentric but rather blur the boundaries of the human. In this displacement of what constitutes man, language is central and thus becomes a fulcrum of repositioning into the animal. This process of theriomorphosis of the verbal sphere suggests that when language becomes animal the human follows. And this is the alternatively threatening and liberating function of fantastic animals such as the untranslatable vipistrelli, the canie, or the porrovio—this latter, which, Landolfi informs us, “is not a beast; it is a word” (Cancroregina 77).¹ Thus the animal presence threatens the dissolution of the ties between signifiers and signified and points to the beginning of a reformulation of the boundaries of verbal expression, which is mapped by the development of Landolfi’s literary work through the years.