Eccezionale e standard. Un’ipotesi tipologica sul personaggio del romanzo ipercontemporaneo

This work aims to analyse the concept of the typical character in the contemporary novel. It will argue that some novels from the past thirty years consciously reflect on this concept, proposing a typical character that is no longer built on the metonymic relationship between the particular and the general, as was common in the 19th century, but rather on the dialectical relationship between the exceptional and the standard. I will demonstrate this through the analysis of three novels (in addition to other collateral texts): American Psycho (1991) by Bret Easton Ellis, L’Adversaire (2000) by Emmanuel Carrère, and La natura è innocente (2020) by Walter Siti. In these works, the traditional exceptionality of four characters (a serial killer, a multiple murderer, a matricide, and a prince) is progressively questioned through a narrative that prefers, both formally and thematically, a daily, routine, and unexpectedly mass dimension. The three works cover the thirty years I intend to examine in a homogeneous manner and elaborate the dialectic of exceptional and standard by resorting to different narrative solutions (from autofiction to biofiction, from pure fiction to non-fiction), allowing for a varied and comprehensive analysis. Above all, when studied together, these novels enable us to construct a typological hypothesis on the contemporary character, who is no longer extraordinary but remains intriguing due to his universal mediocrity. The thesis is structured into two main sections. The first section explores the concept of ‘type’ through Aristotle, Theophrastus, La Bruyère, and Lukacs, whose typological theory is regarded as an unparalleled point of departure. The dialectic of the exceptional and the standard, recently theorized, is subsequently examined in the context of three potential types of negative characters: the villain, the corrupt hero, and the antihero. The second section is made up of three chapters and analyses the dialectic of the exceptional and standard through a specific textual analysis. The investigation is not confined to the examination of a single exemplary text but unfolds through a thorough exploration of the primary text and other ancillary works, to illustrate the various stages of a specific typification process. So the first chapter is devoted to Siti’s La natura è innocente, without overlooking the trilogy of Il dio impossibile (1994-2006) and Resistere non serve a niente (2013); the second chapter to Carrère’s L’Adversaire, which is juxtaposed with Capote’s In Cold Blood (1966), Carrère’s La classe de neige (1995) and some of his literary descendants or successors, namely Cercas with El impostor (2014), Luzzatto with Max Fox (2019), Albinati with La scuola cattolica (2016) and Lagioia with La città dei vivi (2020); the third chapter to Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho, of which The Shards (2023) is a bona fide prequel.