Tesi per stampa 1 - Padis - Sapienza

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Capitolo terzo
Così, si può affermare con Victoria Glendinning che “nearly all the short
stories she wrote during the war (collected in The Demon Lover) have this
element of time breaking down, a concept of London as a city of
ghosts” 27 .
Anche il passato affiora nelle sue pagine come teatro di fantasmi;
lo coglie Phyllis Lassner:
Ghosts are neither tricks nor figments of the imagination in
Bowen’s stories. Experienced as inexplicable presences, as
sounds or changes in the atmosphere of a house, or as
disembodied voices, they are the conduit to a past that reaches
out as though asking to be reexperienced but that cannot even
be understood by the haunted characters. This past is, of course,
the continued residue of human history, for no matter what
their form, Bowen’s ghosts project very human feelings. 28
La storia ufficiale è quella dei vincitori 29 : “raw history […] only chroni-
cles the survivors. A defeat accompanied every victory; faiths failed;
millions went under leaving behind no trace” 30 . La storia, insomma, è
indifferente al dramma delle Antigoni. Al contrario l’immaginazione ar-
tistica considera soprattutto quelli che Primo Levi definisce “i sommer-
27 VICTORIA GLENDINNING, op. cit., p. 143.
28 PHYLLIS LASSNER, op. cit., p. 10.
29 Si veda, in proposito, la posizione di Walter Benjamin. Cfr.WALTER BEJAMIN,
“Tesi della filosofia della storia VII”, in Angelus Novus. Saggi e frammenti, Torino: Einaudi,
1962/1995, pp. 78-79.
30 ELIZABETH BOWEN, “The Bend Back”, in MT, pp. 54-60; p. 57.