“A drama of passion”. In the palimpsest of «The Flame of Life» by d’Annunzio

Abstract

The paper explores in its manifold implications the interpretation of d'Annunzio's The Flame of Life that Rainer Maria Rilke inserts in an annotation on Eleonora Duse in his Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge. In this light, d'Annunzio's novel and its language of passions, between the myth of eros and the myth of poetry, reveal a complex and intense notion of the profound and intimately conflicting ambivalence inherent in the artistic metamorphosis of interiority in a theater, of the identity in image and legend, of pathos in allegory. In this frame, at the center of which are the face and the mask of an actress and her processes of splitting and identification, the adventurous D’Annunzio's research in the palimpsest of literature, through its multilayered textual and intertextual stratifications, is more functional than ever, among the emotions, the gestures and the words of a ‘previous life’ that resurfaces in the passions of the characters and reveals their destiny.