Il dolore degli altri: dal distacco alla partecipazione (Igor Stiks, Mentre Alma dorme)

The article discusses two main ways of relating to the pain of others (Sontag 2003) in contemporary literature: the sacralization of the silence of the traumatised subject, and the talkative narrating of fictional horrors (Giglioli 2011). The paper is an attempt to find a third way of presenting the reality, a way which neither gives up on facing the trauma, nor on narrating. This third way should produce a new form of conscious and politically responsible myth. Such an approach is exemplified by the analysis of the novel Eliah’s Chair by Igor Štiks, in which the European attitude towards the besieged Sarajevo is portrayed through the myth of Oedipus, and through a warning about the dialectic of Enlightenment (Adorno and Horkheimer 1947).