Fuori e dentro il gioco. I giochi e il ‘ludico’ nei racconti di Toni Cade Bambara, Grace Paley e Rita Ciresi

The aim of this research is to explore the narrative, social, aesthetic and existential functions of games and play in the short fiction of Toni Cade Bambara (1939-1995), Grace Paley (1922-2007) and Rita Ciresi (1961-); the short story collections included in my corpus are respectively Gorilla, My Love (1972), the Collected Stories (which appeared in a single volume in 1994, but were published individually since 1959) and Sometimes I Dream in Italian (2000). This study investigates the recurrence of games and play as thematic elements in the three collections, exploring their textual function; simultaneously, my analysis intends to gauge the socio-political significance of games and play in the fiction of these three authors, interpreting both as a deliberate poetic choice conveying political positions. In my study, theoretical reflections on play are employed as a critical tool to delve into the representations and functions of games and play in narrative; in the corpus I selected, this interpretive tension is not exhausted within the margins of the text, but it unveils an aesthetic strategy intentionally employed by the three authors. Such approach connects ‘playfulness’ in the narrative to Toni Cade Bambara, Grace Paley, and Rita Ciresi’s authorial positions and disruptive textual politics, with different results depending on each author. In my analysis, I adopt an intersectional perspective, by reading the discursive elements of class, race/ethnicity and gender through the critical lens of play theory. By applying play theory to a body of works different from those hitherto considered by literary criticism, my research posits that the recurrent theme of games/play foregrounds gender, race and class dynamics in systematic and unprecedented ways in both the narrative and the textual construction; at the same time, reading literary texts through play theory redefines the role of play (as an element stemming from/characterizing culture, which is also intimately connected to aesthetic configurations) in defining the complex social dynamics portrayed in the texts. On a thematic level, this operation highlights a cyclic stigmatization and frustration of games and play both in their premises and in their outcomes, the latter being prescriptively manipulated and inscribed in a set of normalizing rules and roles, controlled forms of interaction, conventional styles; yet, the short stories reveal how games and, above all, play possess a destabilizing and revolutionary potential – sometimes latent, sometimes deliberately employed by the protagonists. The corpus selected for this research – short fiction written by women – has been chosen in view of the fact that the semantic condensation of the short story form inevitably brings the narrative elements of games and play to the fore, thus highlighting the performativity of the social system, which is experienced with particular harshness by the female characters in the stories. In fact, in such narratives women are the ones who mostly convey ludic paradigms, being at once creators of play experiences and trapped in the prescribed roles typical of traditional configurations of games and play: they experience frustration and powerlessness resulting from being part of/playing the game, yet at the same time they identify potentially disruptive ways out in the inherently subversive features of play itself. My research also takes into account the different ethnicities, social backgrounds, and cultural belonging of each individual author: such elements significantly impact the narrative representation of games and play in the texts and their subsequent critical interpretation. Nevertheless, these differences are to be considered as an enriching factor embedded in play, which is in itself a unifying experience, as it is (at least potentially) present in everyone’s life. It may be argued that in the last decades of the twentieth century a quintessential ludic attitude invades the cultural and political life of the United States in unparalleled ways, with movements such as the Hippies and the Merry Pranksters; this vibrance reverberates in the intensification in the arts and culture of a politically engaged sensibility, which actively questions the status quo and promotes crucial cultural change. The same time span and social context also witness the inception and the spread of the second wave and third wave feminisms: such movements and the cultural turmoil of that historical moment inform and undergird the militant poetics of Bambara and Paley, and are retrospectively explored in the role they play in Ciresi’s short fiction. From this angle, the three collections by Bambara, Paley and Ciresi are considered as three points of observation from which to examine the transformation of the category of play, in order to assess its ethical, formal and aesthetic evolution. In the first part of my dissertation, I provide a clarification of the difference between the notions of ‘game’ and ‘play’: the first is regulated by norms and tends to be competitive, whereas the latter refers rather to the players’ performance, and the pleasure that stems from it. A larger section is then devoted to an exploration of the state of the art in play theory, mainly in the fields of philosophy, anthropology and sociology; the investigation is carried out looking at games and play and their interpretation, respectively, as cultural, aesthetic and metaphorical elements. Subsequently, I illustrate the critical texts devoted to the investigation of the relationship between games/play and literature. The second part of my study focuses on the close readings of the stories, which are examined in two separate sections. The first one deals with the representation and actualization of games in Toni Cade Bambara’s, Grace Paley’s and Rita Ciresi’s collections in three different chapters, through three concepts that activate the interpretation of games in the stories (respectively heterotopia, the spoilsport and the threshold). The second section analyzes play in its aesthetic and possibly revolutionary connotations, considering the three collections in a comprehensive chapter. In the final part of my study, I focus on the connection between the transgressive practices adopted to avoid the predetermined outcomes of games and play at the intradiegetic level and the extratextual dimension, identified in the authorial strategies of Toni Cade Bambara, Grace Paley and Rita Ciresi. Such disruptive textual politics are identified, respectively, with Toni Cade Bambara’s involvement in feminist theory and black nationalism, Grace Paley’s literary experimentalism and narrative portrayal of political activism, and finally Rita Ciresi’s use of irony as a performative act of self-determination.