Esprimere l’inesprimibile: la Grande Guerra come ‘accadimento dell’impossibile’

Abstract

For the huge number of soldiers involved, the disruptive technology employed, for its length perceived as potentially endless, the Great War is an unprecedented event, an experience absolutely impossible to foresee or even imagine before it took place (Leed, 1985; Fussell, 2000; Gentile, 2008). It comes as no surprise, then, that the protagonists of this event, the soldiers, produced an impressive amount of documents, not only letters, but also diaries, memoirs, autobiographies, an actual river of words which seems to convey a sort of compulsion to write, an inner need to tell this absolutely new experience (Gibelli, 2014). But these features of modern and total war are exactly what made World War I a limit experience, an ‘impossible happening’ (Gibelli, 1991), for the generation who lived it. The awareness of this impossibility belongs not only to historians and historiographers, but also to the WWI’s protagonists themselves, who, living this global carnage in first person, often testify the lacking of a vocabulary able to describe this unspeakable experience. Thus, this paper aims to investigate the way the WWI’s protagonists tried to express the inexpressible: by leaving things unsaid (censoring what was too horrible, or auto censoring themselves, or removing the experience), choosing compromise solutions (i.e. attempting to minimize or to find a new language), or arriving to the last form of expression of the unspeakable, that is the symptom (war neurosis).