Tra Storia eMito: L’ossimoro Siciliano Secondo Gesualdo Bufalino

Abstract

Defining himself as a “Sicilian-European”, Bufalino, in his literary and poetic works (in particular his L’amaro miele and Museo d’ombre) as well as his numerous journalistic articles and reviews (in the collections Cere perse and La luce e il lutto), elaborates sonorities and significations which attempt to reinstate the chromatic nuances and the mosaic imagery of a Sicily which is not only a “metaphor” – as Sciascia often wrote – of a Mediterranean civilization in continual transformation, but also a space in which, by means of memory positioning, it is possible to revisit a heritage at once historical and cultural, material and immaterial, capable of affirming itself as an identifying principle in constant evolution. In this sense the insular Sicilian space becomes an inexhaustible fount of representations and self-representations from which Bufalino develops a highly personal poetic and an imaginative world which reestablishes Sicily in its natural vocation of “islandbridge” and “islands-plural” forever influenced by European rationalism and a sort of magic-mythic blown forcefully from the southern shores of mare nostrum