Exquisite Corpses: Visualization and Domestication of the Dead Body in Italian Crime Fiction

Abstract

In 1990s’ Italy, crime fiction reached a position of centrality and prominence in the publishing market, the consumption of literature and the attention of critics. Indeed the success of contemporary crime fiction is a worldwide cultural and transmedia phenomenon. My research argues that the popularity of this genre is due mainly to its depiction of bodies and crime scenes, a representation that incorporates the specific ontological and epistemological paradigms of an era. Although there has never been a crime story without a good body, today any crime fiction story, written, televised, filmed or on the Internet, has the representation of the corpse as its distinctive and essential element. The corpse has become the real tool of the detective and the international hallmark of the genre. A visual/medical culture has permeated and transformed contemporary society and has entered the genre as a recognizable background, hardly needing translation, eroding local features and rewriting the dynamics between local and global. Yet the diffusion in crime fiction of a necro aesthetic of corporal dismemberment, with its fetishism of pieces and organs, has not always been isomorphic to a hegemonic discourse. In fact the representation of the body resulting from the progressive medicalization of Western society has also been the means of an alternative discourse which is dissonant with that of science, medicine and socio-cultural models of compliance. In the 1990s both the neo-noir writers and the literary group of the so-called Young Cannibals renewed the Italian literary panorama with works overflowing with extreme and detailed violence. Their protest against the status quo has been inscribed in tortured, killed, dismembered and commodified bodies. More recently crime fiction has been invaded by pornographic and gore motifs. The constant reiteration of torn apart bodies has domesticated their description, eroding the disturbing effect that such representation previously had on the public’s perception. Behind sensationalistic and graphic representations of corpses, the genre has returned to a moralistic and biologizing neo-conservatism in the depiction of deviance, abnormality and crime. It looks spectacular, standardized by the cultural industry and sanitized by scientific and medical imagery.