La verità plurale: itinerario spirituale di Gesualdo Bufalino in dialogo coi Francesi

This thesis retraces the existential itinerary in search of the truth of the Sicilian writer G. Bufalino, with a particular focus on the filter of the French literature that, from an early age, constituted the privileged field of reference for his formation. It is obvious that the phases of this itinerary are not rigid, and in the same way, Bufalino’s readings are not homogeneous. In fact, he has moved away from some authors or has returned to re-read them at different stages and with a changed spirit. However, the systematization that we propose is useful to build an overview of the spiritual life of the writer. The first phase is entitled "Bufalino and the French poets" and identifies a very young Bufalino in search of an 'aesthetic' truth. It starts from the years ranging from childhood to the call to arms, therefore more or less from the period between 1930 and 1942. Formed as a teenager on French symbolists and especially on Baudelaire, the young Bufalino got an existential vision, tools rhetoricians, emotions, a mass of images, and more than anything else a vision of literature as the depositary of an indecipherable truth, an activity to be indefatigably dedicated to and spent on until it consecrates its existence to the cult of form. The second phase is "Bufalino and the French Catholic writers" and goes approximately from 1942, the year in which he was called to the front, until '50. In these years, Bufalino undertook a fruitful correspondence with the intellectual Angelo Romanò who, in turn engaged in religious travails, began it to many readings and in particular to that of French Catholic writers, among whom we have isolated Claudel, Mauriac , Bernanos, Cendrars who seemed to us more than others useful to observe a Bufalino in search of a truth of faith. The third phase of the spiritual life of Bufalino is “Bufalino and the French Existentialist writers” and begins roughly in the 50s and ends in 1981, the year of the publication of his first novel, ‘Diceria dell'untore’. It begins with an interest in the truth of reason and later with a marked preference in particular for the work of Albert Camus. The fourth and last phase is “Bufalino and the plural truth’ and begins immediately after 1981, and observes the final turning point of Bufalino's spiritual research until the end of his life, that is until 1996. Bufalino will definitively renounce both the metaphysical and the materialistic options, and he will entrust his sense question entirely to literary research, understood as a differently 'sacred' writing.

Questa tesi ripercorre l’itinerario esistenziale di G. Bufalino alla ricerca della verità, vissuta dallo scrittore siciliano attraverso la lettura di Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Mallarmé, Toulet, ma anche dei grandi scrittori cattolici francesi Claudel, Bernanos, Mauriac, nei quali Bufalino sperò di trovare la verità della fede che infine rifiutò, cercando nei grandi esistenzialisti francesi e soprattutto in Camus, la verità della ragione. La tesi rintraccia le influenze di questi autori su Bufalino che rinuncerà in definitiva ad entrambe le opzioni, quella metafisica come quella materialistica, e si dedicherà interamente alla letteratura intesa come una scrittura diversamente ‘sacra’: la letteratura dove le storie e le verità coesistono e alla «povertà univoca della verità», si contrappone la «verità plurale» che tutte le opzioni accoglie e contiene, la menzogna perfino. Una verità contraddittoria e in perenne divenire: come la vita.