Sally Bonn’s meditations on writing

Sally Bonn’s essay Writing writing writing (Metauro edizioni, SOFFÌA series, translated by Matteo Martelli, with a preface and an essay by Margareth Amatulli, pp. 203, €20.00), is located in a territory that is not easily ascribed.

Halfway between an autobiographical story, an art book, and the story of an intellectual formation, the book is above all a meditation on writing and on the gesture that it itself implies from antiquity to the present day. Imbued with childhood memories and an iconographic apparatus that places the writing subject in equally precise times and places, giving it the shape of a sort of “bildungsroman”, the essay would also seem – in a broader sense – a real excursus of the history of ideas.

Since writing is a relationship, the author does not only talk regarding the self but starts from the autobiographical act and then welcomes the testimonies and specificity of other writers and writings. In fact, if the act of writing implies leaving traces, being present even following disappearance (the echo of Jacques Derrida is recognisable), it is no coincidence that Sally Bonn makes use of authors who have concentrated their work around this dilemma: Proust, Benjamin, Robert Walser.

But it is above all the “gesture” of writing that takes hold, whose evolution in the essay goes hand in hand with the history of human evolution, as demonstrated by the various supports on which Bonn exercises her hand as a writer over the course of the twenty chapters of the volume. It is no coincidence that Margareth Amatulli, in the preface to the book, notes that “Sally Bonn’s work offers a new look at writing, freeing it from the emphasis on content and focusing on what it represents in itself, starting from its very materiality, from history, from the supports that evolve over time, from the places and objects that preserve their traces”, placing the author in the wake of “autotheory”, a new female genre recently inaugurated in the United States by Maggie Nelson, and whose originality would be to amalgamate one’s autobiographical experience together with a personal theoretical reflection, all within an interdisciplinarity of genres which the French critical debate had already felt the need for since the 1970s.

An act that goes back to the mists of time, according to the author the writing does not differ much from the loving gesture, necessary for the survival of the species and our identities, so much so that it connects them in a crucial passage: “And I don’t know why, this phrase “put in writing” perhaps because it resonates with the other “lay out on paper” makes one think of a bed, white sheets and bodies lying there. Bodies intertwining between undone sheets. To smells, to humidity. With erotic gestures. And then, I don’t know if we should conclude anything from it, but the something in which this verb appeared coincided with the writing, in French, of the first epics and with the development of courtly poetry. Write love?”.