Murder Made in Italy by Ellen Nerenberg

Author:Ellen Nerenberg [Nerenberg, Ellen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Media Studies, Violence in Society, True Crime, Murder, General, Serial Killers, Ethnic Studies, European Studies
ISBN: 9780253012425
Google: od9VEAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Published: 2012-03-29T05:27:19+00:00

SIMONA VINCI’S DEI BAMBINI NON SI SA NIENTE: “RISE UP SWEET WOMAN CHILD”

Dei bambini non si sa niente (A Game We Play), Simona Vinci’s first novel (1997), negotiates a series of inside-outside binaries, transactions that convey the alternations between a recognition of the law and its transgression, of the allowable and the impossible, of the knowable and the inscrutable.27 Interestingly, these exchanges do not materialize along gender lines, with some attributes associated with either males or females for the purposes of contrast. Vinci instead establishes a composite, heterogeneous—and heteronormative, a point I return to—group entity within which these issues are negotiated. The notion of group identity among young adults was discussed in part 2 in relation to the Novi Ligure murders, and in Vinci’s novel, that notion shifts downward in age. Dei bambini is particularly useful for the way it inches up to the various boundaries mentioned, until, when the limit is finally breached, it is an act that seems horribly inevitable.28

While Tamaro’s stories, published earlier in the decade, gave expression to one facet of the abject, concentrating on what is expelled and consigned to the place of disposal, Vinci’s novel illustrates other aspects of Kristeva’s concept. Employing Mary Douglas’s important 1966 anthropological explorations of the opposition of the clean to the impure, Kristeva examines the collapse of the distinction between self and other, finding that the “abject has only one quality of the object—that of being opposed to I.”29 Signs of the nonexistence abound, and we are constantly reminded of the frailty of being when confronted with the manifestation of nonbeing. As Kristeva observes, “loathing an item of food, a piece or filth, waste, or dung…. Food loathing is perhaps the most archaic form of abjection.”30 Other examples of the abject include sewage, vomit, a wound with pus or blood, menstruation, excrement, and the soulless corpse. Human reaction to these signs tends toward the physical and includes retching, nausea, gagging, spasms, and general repugnance.

Chief in Kristeva’s elaborations of the abject is the dual and contradictory function of the skin, which both contains that which it protects and keeps at bay that which it defends against. This contiguity marks constant peril. Chapters 2 and 3 examined the motif of the slashing or shredding of protective skin in various contemporary Italian cultural expressions of serial murder. What Vinci’s novel demonstrates is not only how fragile is any protective casing (skin, hymen, colon), but also, given the contiguity just described, how threats to its integrity are imminent. The contradictory relation of the skin is hinted at in the incoherence of the lyric “Rise up sweet woman child” (my italics). This lyric, from a Skunk Anansie song played on Mirko’s boom box one afternoon in the capannone, or shack, in Dei bambini—which I use as the heading for this section—blurs the distinction between adult and child, who in the song become rhythmically fused.

The collapse of the distinction between child and adult lies at the heart of Vinci’s novel, complicating issues of responsibility, criminal or otherwise.

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