Carmelo Bene e il santo-feticcio. Dalla letteratura al teatro e ritorno

In his novel Nostra signora dei turchi (1966), Carmelo Bene represents a character that identifies himself with the remains of a martyr inside a reliquary. In this paper, I move from this narrative sequence and explain it in light of Bene’s thought, which I interpret through the prism of Ugo Volli’s theory of fetiscism. I then relate this thought to 20th–century theories of theatrical experience, and in particular to Grotowsky’s ideal of the actor–saint. These theories present an idea that seems to unify the two meanings of the ancient term persona (persona and personaggio, person and character) and to propose a particular ideal of secularized sanctity. I then underline that the perspective from inside the reliquary also recurs in other literary works, thus constituting a topos, which deconstructs a semi–symbolic system based on the opposition between inside and outside. Therefore, this paper has a centrifugal structure: it studies the meaning of a circumscribed literary passage by reconstructing its connections to a set of ideas circulating in a broader cultural milieu.