La narrazione tra individuo e collettività in «Lotta di classe» di Ascanio Celestini

In the landscape of studies that have critically addressed the historic relationship between literature and labor, Ascanio Celestini’s Lotta di classe situates itself peculiarly, almost slipping under the radar. However, it offers no less fertile avenues for investigation. Through the tools provided by the theory of literature and the stylistic analysis, the article will demonstrate the presence of a line connecting the shared perspective of the subordinate, critically subsumed as the «mass-worker», whose most emblematic representation is perhaps in Balestrini’s Vogliamo tutto. The novel bases its foundations on this individual focalization, serving as a device for adaptation to the era of advanced neoliberal capitalism. Unable to propose a path that formally restores a choral voice, the focalization becomes fragmented, and the reconstruction of a strong opposition nucleus that is also a community opening passes through the proximity of the characters’ paths, the mechanical reuse of scenes, statements, and declarations, in the intersection of narrative threads that tend to link the protagonists together. Different voices speak, but they testify to the same experience of discomfort and exploitation. The frequent references to consumerist reality do not offer a chimerical refuge in the fleetingness of goods but are reversed in their revolutionary potential. They become objects of the same struggle as men, who are in turn already subjects to incessant work reification.