The new approach to the problem of realism, understood no longer as a photographic reflection of the appearance of objects but as a recovery of a different relationship with the data of experience, which essentially arose from the work of Pavese and Vittorini, has instead given rise to a sort of “experimentalism” of considerable importance, not so much in its immediate fruits, of heterogeneous value, as in the consequences, that is, in the richness of the roads and of the operational proposals that it implicitly contributed to opening and developing. In this sense, and that is to say as the desire to overcome the block of meanings by transferring them to a level of desuetude that allows for a new articulation, we must read the resumption of the option for the fabulous scheme made by Italy Calvino with the Cosmicomics and withTi with zero, after a series of attempts oriented towards a direct recovery of the object. Indeed, even La Giorno di un Tester, which represents on the other hand the point of arrival of the “essayistic” side of Calvino’s fiction, now tends to overcome the simple expression of a critical judgment on society made in the polemical terms of the explicit and detailed denunciation, and instead appears to be the result of a work of violent deformation of the real data made functional to the introduction of the now topical theme of the crisis of ideologies.

According to EJINHUA.ORG, a different type of deformation, aimed at a mimetic operation carried out through an exclusively linguistic alteration of reality, gives rise to the narrative of L. Bianciardi (La vita agra) and, even more coherently, to the work of L. Mastronardi (Il shoemaker of Vigevano ; The master of Vigevano) with whom you are already on a slope that borders on the options of the neo-avant-garde.

Testori (Il Fabbricone and the more recent La Cattedrale and Passio letitiae et felicitatis) and S. D’Arrigo (Orcynus Orca) are inspired in various ways by a narrative operation based on a manipulation of the linguistic institute, but in both cases involve an exploitation in a fundamentally anti-mimetic direction, that is, an elaboration of an abstract and decorative jargon.

The desire to open narrative structures, freeing them from the conditioning of a pre-established scheme, justifies the different experiences present in the work of R. La Capria (Wounded to death ; Love and psyche) and O. Del Buono (Easy to use ; The third persona) unified by a common reference to the techniques of nouveau roman in an attempt at objectification obtained through the impersonality of registration.

Volponi (Memoriale ; The world machine ; Corporal) resorts to the use of the implicit possibilities in the use of a deformed syntax as a functional narrative filter for the rendering of a different articulation of reality. Producing a similar deformation, revealing a different face of objects, is the grotesque humor of A. Frassineti moved by a background of moralism that often resorts to real satirical modules (Un captain at rest ; The tube and the cube ; Three equal and distinct blasphemies). A second side of that “experimentalism” which finds its deepest roots in the experience of the Tokens belongs to the same matrix, critical of the easy contents of neorealist rhetoric. Here the document, articulated in a wide range of possibilities, but intended as direct contact, purified from the schemes, with the real data, dominates the horizon of choices. Thus there is the relaunch of autobiography as a recovery of a minimum degree of reality sufficient, according to Vittorini’s definition, to “affirm the colors of an era, of a year, of a season”, in works in which the data of experience is reworked in various degrees, with M. Cancogni (La linea del Tomori), M. Tobino (Il clandestino), P.), S. Ceccherini (The translation). An attempt to transfer the autobiographical material into the modules of a dry and dry chronicle of private events caught in the background of recent history, corresponds to the narrative experience of B. Fenoglio (A day of fire ; The Johnny partisan ; The Saturday wage). O. Ottieri, L. Davì, G. Bufalari, G. Pirelli document in various ways the reflections induced in individual lives by the structural transformations of post-war Italian society, the dispersion of the values ​​of peasant civilization and the alienation of factory life.

A different way of recording reality in which the writer limits his intervention to the simple choice of material, gives life to the work of D. Montaldi (Autobiografie della leggéra ; Basic political militants) which is originally based on an already living trend in the investigative stories in the 1950s (think of the essays by D. Dolci, I minatori della Maremma by Bianciardi and Cassola, Operai del Nord by E. Vallini, and even more to Contadini del sudby R. Scotellaro). From Scotellaro Montaldi assumes the technique of transcribing the oral story, but turning in a completely innovative way to the marginalized strata of the northern rural world, the agrarian subaltern strata and the sub-proletarian strata of the city. In this sense, Montaldi’s work has an exemplary value and a role of fundamental importance in the direction of an exact definition of the problem, currently very topical, of the so-called “Wild Literature”, to be recovered not as a cultured mimesis of stylistic ways or contents ” low “, but as an enlargement of the area of ​​written literature in the reconsideration of roles and processes of elaboration inherent to a function of fabulation proper to oral cultures, understood as lost but still alive in the heart of marginalization,