Interiorizzazione e straniamento: co-originarietà di tempo, forma e contenuto nell’Orologio di Carlo Levi

<i>L’orologio</i>, as the title of Carlo Levi’s 1950 work alludes to, marks an important time in the narrator’s life. This is a time in which the poetics of childhood and family hold a strategic importance for the narrator’s ability to come to terms with his own present and presence in the world. This study explores how Proustian notions of memory, time and self-reflection shape the narrator’s considerations on living and writing in Italy after the end of the war. As an oneiric dimension connotes the harmony of Proustian elements and segments, they also help to dispel claims of <i>L’orologio</i> as being a text connected to, and generated by, conventional Neorealism. They confirm, instead, Levi’s idea that, unlike other forms of naturalism, realism “creates reality for the first time in the act of expression” (Levi, <i>Prima e dopo le parole</i> 31). In Levi’s work, reality is created through the reality of literature and painting. The narrator’s break with linear time, as he appears less interested in the past as an external reality than in the notion of the past in the present, is the result of a personal crisis about his presence in the world. The Eternal city becomes the narrator’s companion in his existential journey, as well as its geographical focus. “Effimera e provvisoria”(<i>L’orologio</i> 3) is his via Gregoriana room, the one in which he is lodging at the time of writing. The notion of the ephemeral seems to paradoxically be the only (a perennial survival of sorts) permanent asset for Rome