«Bracconiere di ricordi». Memoria e oblio in Gesualdo Bufalino

Abstract

The essay aims to analyze the connection between memory and oblivion that Bufalino investigates in his inventive work. Memory and its reverse, forgetfulness, are important themes of a writing that questions itself on the very reasons for its making. Bufalino’s narrative is populated with characters without a past, constructed by subtraction, through a chiaroscuro made up of full and above all voids, omissions, erasures. In the stories of the book L’uomo invaso e altre invenzioni the ghosts of oblivion and the emblematic images of erased memory, of the bleeding of memories affected by «wounds of passing time» coexist with references to the literary character of the “forgetful”, who suffers from poverty or from an excess of memories. The figure of the “forgetful”has a metaliterary value and becomes a double of the narrator.