Narrare l’assenza

“Le jour de congé” di Inès Cagnati tra récit de filiation e récit poétique

Abstract

This essay examines the work of Inès Cagnati (1937–2007), a French author of Italian origin whose fiction anticipates by over a decade the features of the francophone récit de filiation theorised by critics in the 1990s. Through a close reading of Le jour de congé (1973), it argues that Cagnati takes up the formal structures of the modernist récit poétique — circular time, symbolic space, the witness-character — while reversing their function: childhood is no longer a lost Eden but a site of traumatic rupture, marked by the experience of immigration, rural poverty, and social exclusion. The study situates Cagnati at the threshold between two literary paradigms. Whereas Ernaux would later choose the écriture plate and Michon a sacral, celebratory prose, Cagnati reaches the new sensibility through a distinct formal route: the reactivation of the récit poétique tradition codified by Jean-Yves Tadié, inhabited however from its shadow side, where poeticity does not console, rhythm does not harmonise, and repetition does not reconcile. The article traces a "triple absence" — affective, communicative, and social — that structures the narrative, and shows how the autodiegetic voice of the adolescent narrator generates a double optique in which the reader grasps what escapes the child. Cagnati's writing thus emerges as an exemplary case of Neo-modernism: a critical reprise of early twentieth-century forms that transforms them from within, giving voice to the "minuscule lives" that official History left unrecorded. Her œuvre seuil offers a valuable vantage point for understanding the alternative paths through which modernist forms were reactivated and reshaped in the second half of the twentieth century in France.