«Una croce e un cartellino d’inventario». Studio critico sull’opera di Fleur Jaeggy

This thesis is concerned with the work of Swiss Italian writer Fleur Jaeggy (Zürich,1940). Well-known in Italy, as much as abroad, for her cold, brief, detached style, but rather neglected by the critics. In this thesis I try to demonstrate that by researching the intertextual relationships between her work and that of two writers she either befriended (as Austrian writer Ingeborg Bachmann) or translated (as Marcel Schwob), and finally, by putting in relationship her work with the western mystical traditions, it is possible to overcome those obstacles that the existing critical analysis have partially fabricated by setting up an image of the writer that hindered her reception. My analysis has a double scope. On the one hand, I expand on the authors and books I take as reference so to provide a context for the themes and issues that will then be those I will use to interrogate Jaeggy's books; on the other hand, in each chapter I give a close reading of a number of works by Jaeggy at a time. In first chapter I give an outline of the ways her work has been read by the critics. I will here also briefly present a biographical account of her life and her fictional works. Chapter two is dedicated to the study of the reception of Ingeborg Bachmann in her work. I here demonstrate how Bachmann has been an important figure of reference for Jaeggy. This chapter begins by deepening Bachmann’s only published novel "Malina" (1973), to extract from there some themes I will then define and explore in three books by Jaeggy (concentrating on the ambivalence between murder and suicide, on the issue of time, and on the compositional structure). I then give a close reading specifically of "Il dito in bocca", "Le statue d'acqua", "La paura del cielo" and some short stories from "Sono il fratello di XX". In chapter three I begin examining the relationship between Jaeggy and French fin de siècle writer Marcel Schwob starting from Jaeggy's "Vite congetturali", a book highly influenced by the Schwob. I show how Schwob's concept of "conjecture" is tied to the theme of the image and I therefore research this theme in Jaeggy's books. In particular in "L'angelo custode", "La paura del cielo" and "Sono il fratello di XX". In the last chapter I focus on the two novels left examining. This time I will use yet another hermeneutical key, that of Christian western mysticism. After having discussed the issue of defining what mysticism is, I proceed by supplying an outlook of the main features of mystical language. Then, I sketch of the main features of the current debates on the comparative analysis between mysticism and the arts. My comparison is in fact based on these two questions: the “mystical” oxymoron and the mystical “unknowing” as seen in "I beati anni del castigo" and "Proleterka". My goal is to demonstrate how mysticism can be of help not only as a key to read these two books, but mainly to resume the findings of the previous chapters and show the core of what this theses is about: making explicit a poetics of the writer, by opening up new possible ways of considering this writer in the perspective of literary history. The complete fiction by Jaeggy can be summarized in the two elements shown in the quote in the title of my thesis. In the conclusion I rapidly sketch what I take these to be about. I use the image of the cross to describe the way narrative is obstructed or blocked. Finally, I use the image of the inventory card to describe the way her style throughout her books significantly shifts towards denotation.