Tempo di Uccidere: Un Antiromanzo Allegorico

International audienceTempo di uccidere (1947) is the only long-form writing in Ennio Flaiano’s literary production; it’s also an exception in the Italian literary post-war panorama, because of its theme, its setting and its expressive schemes. A deep anti-rhetorical charge inspires the narration: the choice of the novel form is a kind of challenge to the Neorealistic writers and theorists, who supported the knowledge potential of the novel. The enquiry tools of the psychoanalytical literary theory allows to read the crisis represented in Tempo di uccidere in the perspective of the freudian «civilization dis-contents»: the estrangement of the white-man in front of an «uncanny» nature, a guilty feeling that can’t be expiated and the impossibility to domesticate a reality dominated by irrational principles are the interpretation keys of character’s story. Inquiring the ways the author handles the «shift in plot» and defines the coordinates of an ambigu-ous «narrative pact», the formal layout of a “psychological detection story” has been cleared up. Flaiano builds a narration that progressively reveals its allegorical essence, because it represents a signification system that needs an original social deal to be com-municable: the failure of the retrospection and the endless multiplication of possible meanings become the formulas that the author uses to pass on his sentence against the contradictions in the Italian reconstruction process