Eine Autobiographie des Körpers

Goliarda Sapienzas L’arte della gioia

Abstract

This contribution analyzes Goliarda Sapienza’s L’arte della gioia as a distinctive form of life writing in which the body assumes a primary role—not as an object of representation, but as the epistemic center of the narrative. Defining this fictional autobiography as a narration of the ‘life of the body’, I emphasize the political implications of such a literary project. I reconstruct Sapienza’s political engagement and her proximity to the idea of a cultural revolution as interpreted and programmatically outlined by Herbert Marcuse in his proposals for a new aesthetics and a new sensibility in One-Dimensional Man (1964) and An Essay on Liberation (1967). At the same time, I show how L’arte della gioia organizes its aesthetic coherence around the bodily life of Modesta—the irreverent, unhinged, and thoroughly revolutionary heroine of the novel. Marcuse’s aesthetic program, condensed in the notion of liberation, guides Modesta’s refusal of traditional values and social structures, as well as her reorientation of relational and existential aims toward the needs and desires of her body. The novel thus realizes the cultural revolution in which Sapienza believed and which she saw failing at the level of institutional politics. Its radical potential was indirectly confirmed by years of editorial rejection; the novel was eventually published only posthumously.