Un imaginaire dévoilé/déphasé. Stratégies narratives et mémoire culturelle dans le roman 54 des Wu Ming

Abstract

This essay analyses the narrative strategies through which cultural memory is portrayed in 54, a novel in which Wu Ming (a collective of four Italian fiction writers) suggests a literary mapping of the Fifties. This is obtained by a recovery of a shared imaginary tradition which is close to the reader, mixing fictional and historical characters, films, books, different genres of popular literature. Nevertheless, the rewriting of these imaginary traditions involves their displacement, a presentation which is constantly created from an unusual point of view. Thus, shifting the image of what is already known, the text inquires into several modalities of a questioning about cultural memory and its redefinition in relation to contemporary culture. By focusing on these elements, this study proposes an analysis which starts from the construction of the characters, the role of suspense and the adoption of multiple traditions of novel writing.