Bassani and homosexuality

Abstract

In this essay the author analyzes the presence of homosexuality, as well as its symbolic equivalents of injured or diminished virility, in Giorgio Bassani’s narrative. In this direction, the most significant texts are considered The Gold Rimmed Glasses (where the tragic hero is an homosexual), Behind the Door and The Heron, but also the figure of Alberto (and somewhat of the protagonist and narrator) in The Garden of the Finzi-Contini and of Barilari in One night in ‘43 are the subject of thematic interpretation. The author claims that homosexual identity is not investigated itself and ontologically legitimized by Bassani, but takes the value of a metaphor for exclusion, even a violent one, as the one that struck, at the same time, Jewish identity after the enactment of Racial Laws in Italy. From this point of view, the doubt on the “conformity” of his own sexuality, the fear this sexuality would meet the regime’s propaganda stereotypes, or (in Behind the Door) the liberating projection of these stereotypes on an antagonistic character and alter ego seem to inhabit the protagonists of the aforementioned novels and short stories and produce, with their diverted or evaded questions, the agony of false consciousness.