'Gomorrah' and the Documentary Aesthetics in the New Millennium

Turning truth into vision, Gomorra lays the foundations for a new way to narrate reality, a way which is only in part inspired by the poetics of the nonfiction novel. Journalistic inquiry becomes literature by focusing on the power of the word and on the “self” of the author, an eyewitness in search of an element of attraction in order to give strength to the story and to ratify a truth that, otherwise, would be lost in the monotony of crime news. This method confirms Agamben’s idea, according to which the ethical result of testimony does not lie in the conformity between words and events, but in the guarantee that those words and those events will not be forgotten. Gomorra outlines a documentary aesthetics which, thanks to the expositive method of the novelist, turns statistics, objective data, personal experiences of everyday life into a story that combines literature, anthropology and sociology. In this way, Saviano’s self is closely related to the character around whom Marc Augé builds his ethnofiction: a witness and, at best, a symbol