La literatura en la frontera lingüística : el caso de la escritora italo-suiza Fleur Jaeggy

“The real proustian miracle is not that a madeleine dipped in tea tastes the same as another madeleine dipped in tea thus a rising a memory; it is, rather, that with it,the second madeleine can evoke a room, a house, an entire town and that that ancient place can, in a split second, touch the solidityof any present place, forcingits doors and makingthe furniture falter.” [1] With these words Genette presents the main idea of what this thesis aims to analyze, in other words, to reach the evoked dimensions of the content within the texts, the language, the universes, the literary themes.In this concrete case, I will explore the suggesting dimension of an author who I consider very uncommon and exceptional both in Italy, the nation where she lives, as in Switzerland, where she was born and of which she is not very representative. As a study subject, Fleur Jaeggy’s work calls the attention because of the power evoked in the reader by each and every element the authoress uses to unveil her narrative. These elements appear as a constant throughout Jaeggy's literary production and for this reason are analyzed in this study, along with the other constitutive elements of her work: the stylistic evolution within her literary production, her characteristic brevity of expression, her distinctive syntactic sobriety, her typical use of ellipsis. In the same way, the outlines of her characters, her sentimental education processes, her conception of life as well as her sickly inclination to death, her vision of the world and of femininity, will be object of the following research. To study thoroughly Fleur Jaeggy's work requires close attention so as to understand how literary critics have seen her, but, most of all, how she has been seen by those other authors that have written about her. In fact, in order to appreciate Fleur Jaeggy's essence, one must understand and share those words that authors such as Susan Sontag have dedicated to her – and that have been used in the opening of this work – as well as those written by the Nobel Prize winner Joseph Brodsky: “There are two types of literature: there's a prose which revels in things such as its subordinate clauses which are like so many branches, or in its vast syntax, expansive like the one belonging to, let's say, Henry James or even, let's say, Joseph Conrad, if you want. And then there's another type of prose of which the best example could be, let's say, Jane Austen with her concise sentences, each one swiftandcomplete in itself. In this case, the author knows from the very first page what to say, it's not that type of prose where the author gets the headway along with the movement of the pen on a sheet of paper; it's a physiological process, organic, something that is rarely experienced with prose.” [2] Using Brodsky's wordsas an example of the many more that have been said about Jaeggy, this syntactic and poetic prose is the main reason this very research started out; an approach towards this work can in this way be summed up since these words will become ever more clear and necessary as this work moves forward and in depth so as to reach to its own conclusions. 1. Gérard Genette, “Metonimía en Proust” in Figuras III (1972), Lumen, Barcelona 1989, p. 30 2. Extract from the opening speech to Fleur Jaeggy’s book I beati anni del castigo delivered in Nov. 2005 at the La Casa degli Italiani at New York University, NYC.