The accumulation of an external memory: semiotic reflections on a counter-narrative about the aged body

This essay explores the imagery related to the representation of aged human bodies encrusted with a materic stratum that covers the skin and becomes the metaphor for a memory directly and continuously accumulated so as to bear testimony to the identity of the individual. Traces of this imagery are detectable in the media, but more extended and articulated representations can be found in literary exts. Therefore, the analysis takes into consideration a sample consisting of two contemporary Italian novels featuring this theme: La stagione della caccia by Andrea Camilleri (1992) and Il dolore Perfetto by Ugo Riccarelli (2004). The literary representation of elderly people “wearing” their memory as a stratum of various materials deposited on their body day by day is then brought into dialogue with relevant semiotic notions such as the concepts of nakedness, palimpsest, and patina.