La scomparsa di Majorana: il saggio-inchiesta di Sciascia e la rivisitazione grafica di Riccioni-Rocchi a confronto

Abstract

In the 1970s, in the midst of the Cold War, Leonardo Sciascia, the critical and polemic writer from Racalmuto, questioned the nuclear threat and the scientific responsibility of those who had contributed to the atomic bomb. The Disappearance of Majorana, first published in «La Stampa» (in seven installments, from Aug. 31 to Sept. 7), was presented as a philosophical inquiry, but was strongly contested for its historical inaccuracy. According to historians and other critics, Majorana could not have foreseen the realization of the atomic bomb, and his intransigence would not have been a sign of absolute neutrality. However, at the same time, Sciascia’s text was appreciated for the fictionalization of historical context typical of Sciascian writing.In 2015, precisely forty years after the publication of Sciascia’s La Scomparsa di Majorana, Francesca Riccioni and Silvia Rocchi call into question the scientific contribution and disappearance of the Sicilian physicist by transposing Majorana’s story into a contemporary context. In Sciascia’s wake, Riccioni and Rocchi valorize the discovery of the fermion, the so-called “ghost particle”. In their graphic novel entitled Il segreto di Majroana, the particle then offers the perfect analogy for re-telling the disappearance of its creator. To Sciascia’s questions, Riccioni and Rocchi add others by stating that Majorana’s disappearance could become the model for those who would like to erase their traces in a world where interconnectivity seems ubiquitous and continuous.Given this context, this paper aims to compare the Sciascian source text and the graphic adaptation by Riccioni and Rocchi. I will focus on the specificity of the narratological strategies, both literary and multimodal, employed to (re)narrate the metaphysical inquiry. This comparison will focus on the mixing of historical materials, the mise-en-abyme technique that emphasizes the collaboration between writer and reader, and its peculiar spatiality, a “paratopia” that renders the protagonists’s problematic relationship with reality. In doing so, I will uncover the topicality of Sciascia’s approach.

Keywords

• identity
• investigation
• rewriting
• biography
• paratopia
• adaptation