The Voices of Silent Film: Forms of Ekphrasis and Iconotext in Melania Mazzucco’s «Silenzio»

Abstract

In Silenzio. Le sette vite di Diana Karenne by Melania Mazzucco, it becomes clear from the outset that photography, silent film and narrative mechanisms related to the visual, play a structuring role in the novel. The present article examines the forms of hybrid textuality (such as the iconotext) and the various instances of ekphrasis and cinematographic ekphrasis present in the text. The analysis of these formal elements allows for a parallel to be traced between cinematographic ekphrasis and the biographical mode in narrative fiction: just as the literary text reconjures the silent images of cinema through language and the written text, so too does the author, when faced with the silence and impossibility of accessing the past, intervene through fiction to recreate a life. In Silenzio, it is through ekphrasis and cinematic ekphrasis that the gestural narrative language of silent film can emerge, the embodied narrative language characteristic of this medium, creating a space of intersemiotic exchange in which questions relating to agency and (in)visibility in the biographical novel are raised.