The world of work explored by literature – Il Manifesto

The work is there for all to see but – like Poe’s stolen letter – it is an almost invisible object. We circle around it, prophecies are made about its future, its disappearance (through automation) is declared with euphoria or lament, but we all know very little about it. The CGIL did well in inventing the Di Vittorio prize for the best novel about work.

IN MARX’S WORK we find an original ambivalence on this theme: both the liberation of work and the liberation from work (in the German Ideology and here and there). On the one hand, work as man’s first need, on the other, work as fatigue and coercion, which the development of productive forces will one day manage to abolish. Human beings are made not to work but to contemplate nature, life and beauty.

The prize intends to put the literature of the working class, the works with the world of work at the center of the narrative. Both those that narrate the work from the inside, through personal testimony, through stories Gymkhana-Cross by Luigi Davì to Tommaso Di Ciaula and the Balestrini series of Franchi Narratori of the 70s, both those that explore it from the outside, in an imaginative and accurate way, from Memorial (1962) by Paolo Volponi, the pinnacle of industrial literature of the 60s (Ottieri, Parise, Mastronardi…) Steel (2010) by Silvia Avallone.

In Italy the world of work has had an extraordinary literary representation, from the industrial literature already mentioned to the post-Fordist literature of Nori, Nove, Murgia, up to the intense Asbestos by Alberto Prunetti, in 2014 (on his father, a worker at Ilva in Follonica). The choice to dedicate an award to this representation seems most appropriate.

HITTS in the seven finalist titles of the first edition an extreme variety of themes and settings, which corresponds to an equal variety of styles, formal options and narrative strategies.
Danilo Conte – who won – in his With just cause features a labor lawyer, Chiton (partly autobiographical), who tells us all the “cases” he deals with, with a pietas worthy of Victor Hugo and a melancholy look worthy of Chandler’s Marlowe. Elisa Audino – mention of the scientific jury – with Bream for rent he opts for a collection of snapshots, for a narrative poem that gives us an everyday life that is also fragmented and broken, like his speech. The protagonist could meet the “girl Carla” from Pagliarani’s famous poem. Memoirs of a family of glove makers by Antonio Caiafa is a narrative reportage, of sharp anthropological precision, chronicle of a Neapolitan neighborhood and its mutation, almost like an Annales historian. Chronicles of the sixth extinctionby Stefano Valenti, the text with the greatest (and well-founded) literary ambitions, presents itself as the diary of a Robinson Crusoe of the underground, an intellectual son of a bricklayer, who lives in a van and finds himself in an inhospitable world. Trash by Martino Costa plays around waste disposal, an immense theme – which Dickens made universal with his most beautiful novel, Our Mutual Friend – and writes a compelling, picaresque story, with characters from Latin American novels (where “waste” is even the marginal ones). The 35 days of the city of Turin by Cristiano Ferrarese are offered as a literary monument to a memorable workers’ resistance against the silent protest of 40 thousand white-collar workers (at Fiat in 1980). An event that changed our history. Alongside the published works, there is the other section of the prize – the unpublished stories -: the 10 finalists, destined for publication with Alegre), constitute a precious diorama of the socially repressed.

LET’S COME BACK to the double meaning of work, present in the Marxist tradition. The impression is that here the idea of ​​work as a biblical curse prevails everywhere, which it is perhaps possible to get rid of. There is the desire to reduce its weight in our lives, to finally take care of all those things that we really care about, and that have always animated every human narrative.